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Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Football : Wenger: We had a resilient, committed attitude

I believe we had a resilient, committed attitude in our 0-0 draw against Tottenham at White Hart Lane and I'm proud of the players.

But I feel it is two points dropped because we had the best chances and we scored a regular goal that was ruled out by an illusionary foul seen only by the referee. I watched it three times on television and I still don't see what was wrong. That is why at the end of the day it's frustrating.

The referee has seen a push from Emmanuel Eboue but in fact it was Jonathan Woodgate who pushed him as well and then stumbled over Emmanuel Adebayor and falls down. If you see it again you see that it's nothing. It is not acceptable really, it is not serious.

I believe the person closest to the ball was the referee. He was in the best position and did not judge the push from Eboue, he judged the fact that Woodgate fell down.

As for Eboue's sending off, I believe that the first yellow card was very harsh. You have players who make 15 fouls in the game but don't get a yellow card. What he did was clumsy but the first yellow card was very hard. For the second one, if he has retaliated then he deserves a yellow. If someone saw that for real then he deserved to be sent off.

We deal with our problems internally and I want to first see the incident before I assess the situation. It was impossible to see what happened at the time because the ball had gone.

After Eboue's red card we kept playing with two strikers, we tried to win it and there was enough room to win this game. Tottenham created very little overall and even when we had 10 men they never really pulled us out of position.

We needed one or two saves from Manuel Almunia but overall I think we controlled them very well. What troubled us was creating because we were down to 10 men for so long and that's difficult to deal with.

On the injury front, Gael Clichy has had stitches in a head wound while Emmanuel Adebayor will be out for three weeks with a hamstring problem. But we have Carlos Vela, we have Nicklas Bendtner, we have Eduardo, we have Andrey Arshavin and we have Robin van Persie. We have plenty of strikers.

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