Mikel Arteta hits back at ‘lies’ about Arsenal’s Covid postponement request

Mikel Arteta has accused unnamed parties of “lying” about Arsenal’s reasons for requesting the postponement of Sunday’s north London derby, saying they had intended to play the fixture and their actions have been misrepresented.

Arsenal expect to face Liverpool in the second leg of a finely poised Carabao Cup semi-final at the Emirates on Thursday night, with the tie goalless, although Arteta warned that there remained “issues that have not been resolved” in a significantly stretched squad. The game is likely to go ahead but Arsenal received heavy criticism at the weekend when, having determined that they could not meet the Premier League’s minimum threshold to field a matchday squad, they succeeded in moving the visit to Spurs.

Asked whether the reaction bothered him, Arteta said: “Not one little bit because I know why we’ve done it, how we’ve done it, and we were very clear from the beginning that we wanted to play the game. So when somebody is lying you don’t really get offended.”

Arsenal had only one confirmed Covid-19 case when the postponement was announced on Saturday, with the rest of their absences down to injury, the Africa Cup of Nations and suspension, although that number increased shortly after.

A strong statement from Spurs said the league’s rules for calling games off were not written with “the intent to deal with player unavailability unrelated to Covid”, and Antonio Conte called the decision “very strange”.

Questioned on whether he was surprised Tottenham had spoken out, Arteta replied: “That’s nothing to do with me.” He did not specify who he believed was lying but explained Arsenal had operated by the book.

“Whoever is saying we are trying to do something we are not, that’s a lie,” he said. “We have all the evidence we have to provide. You have to provide evidence individually, all the MRIs, all the Covid cases that you have, you have to put it on the table, you have to explain it, you have to answer more questions and you have to go again and do it. We’ve done all the right things.”

In a lengthy call for a clearer approach to the league’s Covid-19 rules, Arteta stated it was “not fair” that some Premier League clubs have played as many as four games fewer than their rivals. “[We need] clarity from the beginning,” he said.

“And the decision we take is a collective, not an individual objective. When you come with individual objectives then it becomes really tricky. The only intention has to be to have the best league in the world, in the best possible conditions, and a league that has only one intention: to maintain the integrity of it.”

Arteta has depleted his squad voluntarily this week by allowing Sead Kolasinac to join Marseille and sanctioning the imminent loan move of Pablo Marí to Udinese. He described his squad as “extremely thin”, although Thomas Partey should be back for Sunday’s match against Burnley after Ghana’s elimination from Afcon.