At Unai Emery’s post-match press conference following the Gunners’ 2-1 Emirates Cup defeat to Lyon, Arseblog News had the opportunity to ask the Arsenal Head Coach how concerned he was about the defence. Here was his response.

“In the first half I think we defended very well. In the first half our positioning was good and offensively we created chances and we controlled the game. Sometimes we had to play without the ball in the first half and we needed to be together defensively and we were.

“But generally in the first 45 minutes the team worked like we want them to and to try to find a way to win. In the second half, we lost a little bit of rhythm maybe. We felt more comfortable on the pitch and this wasn’t a positive comfort we thought maybe because we were creating lots of chances that we were going to win.

“The first goal was a surprise to us and we lost the moment. But I really want to watch the match again and analyse the way we can improve. If I take a worry from today, maybe it is that we thought we were going to win and that can happen.

“We played with a lot of young players today and maybe, maybe we lost a bit of concentration that you need for the whole 90 minutes. But that is a lesson and now we have 90 minutes more to get information. We were in a good position and playing ver well and we lost. We had a good balance offensively in the first half and we lost that in the second half.”

Emery was then asked if he should be buying more defenders, amid rumours of a big money deal for winger Nicolas Pepe. “We are deciding on how to improve. We want to sign players, but only ones who can really, really improve us in this position.

“We wanted to buy a winger and a centre back and we are working. I want a better team than we had last year. I think we have a very good team and we will only buy players that can improve us.”

Emery also confirmed that he is still to decide on his first captain for next season, with Granit Xhaka taking the armband against Lyon. “We have Xhaka and Nacho Monreal and I want two more captains and we will decide who is the number one captain in the next few weeks.”