Sokratis Papastathopoulos has told his Arsenal team-mates they must rally together and beat Chelsea in their next match to keep their top-four hopes alive.

The Gunners lost 1-0 to West Ham at the weekend, leaving themselves in fifth place in the Premier League and six points behind Chelsea, who are fourth.

Arsenal have the chance to immediately reduce that gap on Saturday, when they play Chelsea at Emirates Stadium.

Sokratis said: "If we want to be in the top four we have to work together.

"Chelsea is another game and we have to regroup — a lot — if we want to do something. It will be a difficult game but if we want to be up there, we have to win.

"We did not play well [against West Ham]. All the team was not like the last games. We have to work, we have to look at what our mistakes were and improve for the next games.”

After having their run of 22 matches unbeaten ended by Southampton on December 16, Arsenal have now lost four of their last eight games.

Arsenal registered just two shots on target at London Stadium, as they failed to score in a Premier League match for the first time since the opening day of the season.

Sokratis claims Arsenal’s inability to create chances was to blame for the defeat.

“It is not about the two shots on target,” he said. “Look at how many chances we would have had if we had done better with the last pass.

“Look at how many chances we had to make the last pass. This is the problem.

“I think we did not have what we had in the other games. We did not control the game better than them.”