Martin Keown insists Arsenal HAVEN’T taken a step backwards this season – despite Mikel Arteta’s players sitting 10 points behind Premier League leaders Liverpool

Martin Keown has argued that Arsenal have not taken a step backwards this season despite Mikel Arteta‘s side sitting some way off runaway Premier League leaders Liverpool approaching the business end of the season. 

The Gunners have challenged for the ultimate honours in the English top flight for a number of seasons, but have failed to overturn Manchester City the last two times of asking. 

With Man City‘s autumn form far from their best, many assumed that the north London club would be ideally poised to finally secure their second Premier League title. 

Instead, Arteta’s players have endured an imperfect period, most recently ending their winning record at home with a 1-0 defeat against West Ham. 

But rather than suggesting that Arsenal were moving backwards instead of progressing, club legend Keown insisted that the side have been hampered by injury that could have otherwise allowed them to keep their title-chasing dreams alive. 

‘No (it hasn’t been a backwards step this year), I think the team is getting ever stronger,’ Keown said on TNT Sports ahead of the Gunners’ clash with Nottingham Forest. ‘I don’t think you can plan for four creative players at the top of the pitch to get injured. 

Mikel Arteta has been hampered by the loss of significant players like the recently returned captain Martin Odegaard

‘Odegaard was injured in the first few months of the season and all of this things have an accumulative effect on the group. 

‘There’s still Champions League. There’s still players to come back before the end of the season but the Premier League is slipping away but tonight is an opportunity to close that gap – and hoping that Newcastle do something at Anfield.’ 

Aresenal remain in the grip of an injury crisis which has decimated their attacking ranks, with Bukayo Saka, Kai Havert, Gabriel Jesus and Gabriel Martinelli all currently sidelined. 

As such, Arteta has been forced into creative measures, bringing forward Mikel Merino from central midfield to join the Gunners’ front three against Forest despite the experiment failing to click against West Ham. 

Earlier this month, however, Merino flexed his attacking muscles off the bench, scoring twice to subdue relegation-threatened Leicester. 

Arteta insisted ahead of Wednesday’s match that he will give up chasing the Premier League title ‘over my dead body’ after slipping 11 points behind Liverpool – but believes Arsenal have done well to be above midtable because of injuries and red cards.

‘If somebody tells you at the start of the season, by this time, you have played five times with a red card over half an hour in each of those games, and you have lost this amount of players, what’s the bet?,’ Arteta told reporters. 

So depleted are Arsenal’s attacking ranks that the Gunners are playing central midfielder Mikel Merino in their front three against Nottingham Forest

His manager Mikel Arteta claimed that he will give up fighting for the title over his dead body

‘You are in the middle of the table, at least, and you are out of the Champions League. That’s not the situation.

‘So that tells you the resilience, the resources, the ambition that the team has, every individual has and that has been, probably in my time, one of the proudest moments to work in that sense.

‘The thing is that when you are there, you want more and you want more and you want more. And I’m not going to stop over my dead body.

‘We’ll stop thinking that way and putting everything in that we possibly can to increase the probability of us winning and being better than the opponent and hitting that performance and those standards constantly, regardless of what happens.’