Mikel Arteta answered the Man City question that's on everyone's lips

Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta was asked about what he learned from the defeat to Manchester City in the Carabao Cup final, and how that will apply to the game on Sunday.

Arteta's side lost their chances of a quadruple when they were defeated 2-0 by Manchester City in the final just before the start of the international break.

Obviously, Arsenal played poorly, but there were a lot of things that Manchester City did which made Arsenal play quite badly.

Arteta was asked about that and how he and his team are going to react to it.

Mikel Arteta answered the Man City question that's on everyone's lips

He said: "They’ve done it in the past - there are some moments when we struggled, we didn’t make the right decisions, sometimes we broke that press and then we didn’t take advantage of that.

"Every tactic has its issues and its opportunities as well, and in relation to what they do, we’ll adapt and do the same.

"For us now, learn from that game - and the things we want to change for the next one, and the pain that we felt afterwards - in the right way on Sunday."

As always, Arteta kept all his cards close to his chest, but even his biggest fans had the same opinion after Manchester City beat them at Wembley - Pep Guardiola's tactical setup was designed really well to counter Arsenal's creativity in the final third.

Rather than marking Arsenal players all over the pitch and giving them the opportunity to beat the press through those clever runs that make Arsenal so difficult to play against, Guardiola's Man City just... didn't do that.

They stayed back and controlled possession another way - by not having any of it except for when it's easily retrievable. City let Arsenal's goalkeeper and defenders have the ball, but their set-up was so well designed to get the ball to any of Arsenal's midfielders, that it worked like clockwork.

Arsenal were forced to play it long and lose possession, and all City had to do was sit back in a mid-block and block access to the midfielders.

It is worth noting that City were not always sitting back. There were moments where they pressed Arsenal, but only in the moments where it worked.

It was a disaster for all Arsenal fans to see their rare hopes of a quadruple tarnish, but Arteta had to have learned something from this.

He is too smart not to, and even though he gave a very diplomatic and vague answer to the question, everyone knows he would have thought about revenge.

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