Koscielny - Ending goal drought important

Arsenal defender Laurent Koscielny has praised his teammates for ‘finally’ scoring against Bournemouth on Sunday afternoon.

The Gunners failed to score in three straight games and were without a win in four, dating back to the beginning of January when they defeated Newcastle United by a goal to nil at the Emirates.

A quickfire first-half double from Mesut Ozil and then Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain sealed the three points for the north Londoners, with Bournemouth unable to reply despite their constant pressing.

Speaking to Arsenal Player after the victory, Koscielny, as reported by the club’s official website, admitted that it was important for them to break their goalscoring drought.

It is good, we have three clean sheets in four games and we have to stay focused like this.

All the team played well and did their job and if you want to win games you need to score too. We kept a clean sheet and we need to be more confident and defend together but we will be happy with this.

It was important to win because we needed to stay high up the table with Leicester, Tottenham and Manchester City. We didn’t play well during January and we didn’t win a lot of points. We needed to start a good run with this game and we stayed strong at the back, and scored two goals with our first two opportunities.

We had three games without scoring so it was important for our players.

The experienced French defender, who stepped in for Per Mertesacker as captain on Sunday, claimed that Gabriel, who partnered him at the back, is a ‘very good player’.

You know Gabby, he is a very good player.

He likes his duels and he can play with the ball and passes.

He played very well but the whole back four played well because we stayed together. Sometimes in your game you have a difficult situation but we stayed focus on our job.