{"id":1137,"date":"2026-04-15T22:35:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T22:35:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/socialsport.online\/?p=1137"},"modified":"2026-04-15T22:35:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T22:35:10","slug":"arteta-dont-take-for-granted-what-weve-done-interview-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/socialsport.online\/?p=1137","title":{"rendered":"Arteta: “Don\u2019t take for granted what we\u2019ve done” | Interview | News"},"content":{"rendered":"


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After guiding us to successive Champions League semi-finals, Mikel Arteta feels that it may take some time to really realise what our squad have achieved.<\/p>\n

Only three years ago, we were celebrating our return to Europe\u2019s premier club competition after six seasons away, and after a quarter-final finish on our first attempt, we have now reached the final four in the two seasons since.<\/p>\n

A goalless draw against Sporting CP in N5, coupled with the 1-0 success in Lisbon, has seen us reach the Champions League semi-finals for just the fourth time in our history, and, having achieved half of those in the past 12 months, Mikel is delighted with the progress his team continues to show.<\/p>\n

Now he can\u2019t wait to try and plot a path past Atletico Madrid and take another step forward to finally clinching club football\u2019s ultimate prize for the first time in our history.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a great night, I\u2019m so proud of everybody at the club,\u201d he reflected. \u201cThank you to our supporters for the manner in which they followed the team. It\u2019s the first time we\u2019ve (reached the semi-finals consecutively) in 140 years, so that tells you the difficulty and magnitude of what we\u2019ve done. <\/p>\n

\u201cI think we don\u2019t realise it now, but we\u2019ll realise it in a few years, so don\u2019t take for granted what we\u2019ve done. It\u2019s extremely difficult to achieve, and it\u2019s never been achieved (by ourselves), so big gratitude to our players and everyone who\u2019s contributed to achieving that.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not perfect, we want to improve in every area, but we have two magical nights to play against Atletico and we\u2019re certainly going to prepare well for that.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll take things from (October’s meeting) and games they have played recently, but we\u2019re going to have to go to Madrid, be ourselves, and compete in the manner we have – and then we\u2019ll have a big chance to win it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n Read more<\/span> <\/p>\n

Martinelli keen to use semi-final lessons <\/span>
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Just like in the first leg, we had relied on a solid defensive display to get the job done, and having prevented the two-time Portuguese champions from scoring in 180 minutes of action, we\u2019ve now kept eight Champions League clean sheets this term despite coming up against some of the continent\u2019s best clubs.<\/p>\n

Mikel admits that we will need to step things up against Atletico if we want to progress to the final in Budapest, but our defensive solidity is something that he hopes we can continue to hang our hat on if needed between now and then.<\/p>\n

Reflecting on the goalless draw, he said: \u201cIt\u2019s the Champions League – the margins are very small, and when we had the dominance and situations to kill the tie, we didn\u2019t. It was always going to be open but it was very controlled – especially in the second half – we didn\u2019t allow any shots for the opposition apart from the last long throw, so it was very solid. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe need to improve in certain areas, that\u2019s for sure, and we need some players back in order to do that as well, but overall it was a great night.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Copyright 2026 The Arsenal Football Club Limited. Permission to use quotations from this article is granted subject to appropriate credit being given to www.arsenal.com as the source.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After guiding us to successive Champions League semi-finals, Mikel Arteta<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1138,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arsenal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/socialsport.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/socialsport.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/socialsport.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/socialsport.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/socialsport.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/socialsport.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1137\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/socialsport.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/socialsport.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/socialsport.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/socialsport.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}