Arsenal players held clear-the-air talks after form slumped: Shkodran Mustafi

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London, March 30: Arsenal players held a club meeting to speak their hearts out in an offer to turn their season around after consecutive defeats by Manchester City. Defender Shkodran Mustafi revealed about the same while talking about his team's difficult time in the last part of February, and March.

Arsenal have lost eight matches in all rivalries in 2018 and only came back to winning ways with two strong wins against AC Milan in the Europa League and later with a 3-0 triumph over Watford in the Premier League recently.

The North London side suffered a crunch time during February and March when they lost two back to match against Manchester City, including an EFL Final thrashing and later also suffered a humiliating defeat in the hands of minnows, Brighton.

And now in an interview, defender Shkodran Mustafi has uncovered the squad following such crisis time, the players themselves took it on themselves to hold an emergency meeting to turn around their performance.

“Everyone knew it was a difficult period,” Mustafi said. “The meeting was about trying to listen to different opinions, different ideas and different feelings, and I think we found a way to try to change a bit.

“It’s not that easy because one meeting is not going to change a lot, especially not during the season when you’re playing every three days, but it was important to speak our opinions out loud. Overall it was about giving 110 percent to try to get out of it, and I think we managed it well.”

Arsenal for a consecutive second season, look almost sure to finish outside of top fur as they currently sit sixth in the league, 13 points below fourth-placed Spurs with only eight games to play and it now looks to enter next season’s Champions League they must win the Europa League.

The German also conceded such fact and suggested that the season has been a failure however stated currently they are only looking at the positive side to fight hard in every game.

“To be honest, this season has been more disappointing for us because we had bigger targets,” he told Arsenal Player. “One really big positive thing is that to be able to recover from such a period when everything goes bad and you’re not in form, to be close together and come out of it as a team is a really big, massive thing.

“I’ve been playing in a lot of teams across Europe and I’ve been playing in teams where we have been doing well, I’ve been playing in teams where we’ve been struggling, and it’s not easy to come out especially when you’re a big team.

“You find yourself fighting in every game against every opponent. I think you have to give credit to the team because we managed to come together and go back to the basics. Everyone was fighting for each other to try to get back on a winning streak.”

The Gunners will return to Premier League action on Sunday when Stoke visit the Emirates Stadium and later will face CSKA Moscow in the quarter-finals, the first leg of which takes place on April 5 in north London.