Francis Coquelin: Losing to West Ham is a wake-up call for Arsenal

Francis Coquelin made a mistake in the lead up to West Ham's second goal

ARSENAL midfielder Francis Coquelin has described last weekend's shock defeat to West Ham as "wake-up".

 

The Gunners have been tipped to mount a strong title challenge this season and went into the clash on the opening weekend full of confidence after a positive pre-season.

But they were undone by an impressive performance by the Hammers and now face a difficult Trip to Alan Pardew's Crystal Palace on Sunday.

 

And Coquelin has called on his team-mates to respond to the defeat.

"It’s been a wake-up call for everyone,” he told Arsenal Player. 

"Considering the recent results we had before that, going really well in pre-season, it’s disappointing and it was not an Arsenal performance.

 

"However, in bad things, good things can come out too. It’s good that it happened in the first game so that now we can pull ourselves together with 37 games left. We’ve got time to put things right and that needs to start on Sunday.

"Everybody realises that we need to put more in. When you look at different teams I think a lot of them are ready. You look at Manchester City when they played against West Brom, I think they played really good football.

"We need to pull ourselves together and it’s going to be a real test on Sunday because Crystal Palace have a really good squad. We know the quality we have and we need to respond straight away. We’ve been working really hard in training and we need to put all of the training effort into the game."