Mikel Arteta says the quiet part out loud about this disturbing West Ham trend

Arsenal are easily one of the best teams in England, and have the chance to win the Premier League, in the hopes to end a 20-year drought that has gone longer than anyone would have expected.

In those 20 years, there have been some really good moments, and some really bad ones - which were more recent.

But, since Mikel Arteta has taken over as Arsenal manager, the club has seen good moments, and they are back where they belong - among the cream of the crop.

However, whenever they face West Ham - who they face next in the Premier League - those things do not matter anymore, and they start losing games.

Arsenal have a lot of difficulty defeating West Ham at home

The plan goes out of the window, and everything just stops working the way they want to. Let me put it this way: in the last 42 Premier League home games for Arsenal, they have faced defeat four times.

Out of those four times, they lost to West Ham twice. It is simply baffling. It is like their boogey team, which they just cannot get over.

Arteta was asked about it, and he laid the truth out for all to see.

He said: "We want to continue to play and flow and dominate games in the manner that we are doing, and it’s going to be a key fixture.

"Obviously, we learned in the last two seasons as well, because we had two defeats against them here, and it's something we need to put right, and tomorrow is another opportunity to do that.

"That's the difficulty of that, and the game that we're going to have to play tomorrow as well, with a new manager, and we know Nuno really well, the way he sets his team.

"So we expect a really tough match, as we're going to demand again three days later, to come back and have the same performance to win the game."

It is baffling to see that out of the four losses at home in the last few years, 50% of them have come at the hands of West Ham. It is something that no one expects, but every team has that boogey team they cannot seem to beat on some occasions.

With West Ham getting new manager Nuno Espirito Santo, the new manager bounce will likely kick in, and generate more problems for Arteta.

However, it is good to see that Arteta is aware of that and is not afraid to talk about it, and it will be interesting to see what he does differently this time.