Arsène Wenger praised his side’s character after Arsenal exerted pressure on Liverpool and Manchester City above them in pursuit of Champions League qualification with an impressive 2-0 victory at Southampton.

A wonderful goal from Alexis Sánchez and a late Olivier Giroud header secured the London club’s first league win in this arena since 2003 to hoist them to fifth in the table, three points behind Manchester City and four behind Liverpool. Arsenal boast a game in hand on Jürgen Klopp’s side, with four wins in five matches having pepped belief that Wenger, for all the doubts surrounding his own future, can still guide his team into Europe’s elite club competition for a 19th year in succession.

“I never questioned the character of my side,” the Arsenal manager said when asked about his team’s recovery after they were soundly beaten at Crystal Palace last month. “It’s not because you lose games people expect you to win that you have ‘no character’. We went through a bad patch. It’s a good opportunity to show your character, how you come back and how you recover from that. Maybe the City game [a 2-1 victory in the FA Cup semi-final] gave us confidence but let’s not jump too quickly to conclusions and, instead, focus and give everything at Stoke on Saturday.

“We know we can only win our games. We are more defensively stable. We had a strong performance against Manchester United on Sunday and a strong performance today. I felt that, if you look at individual performances, you couldn’t be disappointed from the goalkeeper right through to Danny Welbeck. Everybody played well, so let’s just continue. Experience can help but I believe that, for us, it’s important to maintain the focus and intensity in every single game. We came to a difficult ground today – and another on Saturday. We’ll need another strong performance at Stoke.”

A third clean sheet in four games is more cause for optimism. “Every game we try to give ourselves a chance,” Petr Cech said. “We shot ourselves in the foot against Tottenham when we lost 2-0 and we are aware we need to win all the remaining games to be in the race [for the Champions League]. We had a big game against United and then here, where historically we haven’t done that well in the league. It was tough in the first half but then we found the opening and deserved to win.”

The only concern centred around Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, who was withdrawn before the interval after suffering tightness in a hamstring. “We don’t know how bad it is,” Wenger said. “I don’t know [about the FA Cup final] but at least he is walking properly. It was tight, not a knife [in his thigh]. Personally I didn’t see any incident where he had to stop a sprint. It was more fatigue but it’s difficult to assess so close.”