Thierry Henry believes that Arsenal need to “relax” in the title race as they eye their first Premier League triumph since 2004.
The Gunners were 4-2 winners over Aston Villa on Saturday lunchtime as they bounced back from their defeat by Manchester City last week, with Mikel Arteta’s men now two points clear at the top of the top-flight table.
Henry was part of the most recent Arsenal team to lift the Premier League trophy in the 2003-04 campaign, when the Gunners claimed the title during their famous unbeaten season.
The former France international acknowledges that many people will still make City the slight favourites to lift the trophy this season due to their recent domination of the division – and he has called on Arsenal to take it game by game.
“I’ve been there,” Henry said in an interview with Uproxx. “You’re going to, during the season, have bad games, and it didn’t happen for little while.
“You’re not going to win for a week or two weeks, it will happen. It’s not how you fall, it’s how you go back on your feet and how you stand after that.
“So, you lost against Man City. Is it shameful? No, it is not. Was it a decider? It might be. Everyone wanted to see if you could, you didn’t. But relax, relax. That doesn’t mean you’re going to now blow everything away and not keep the ship steady.
“You have to stay there. Just keep it at the end of the day, when you look at it, the level of points and defeat, not a lot.
“Yes, we still have a game in hand, but keep calm, keep calm, keep calm. Just believe in what you did since the beginning. Now it is a fight. It was always a fight. But now it is a proper fight.”
Henry added: “A lot of people will give the advantage to City because they’ve been there, because they’ve done it, because they have guys in the team that did it and they know how to suffer, they know how to chase, they know how to be chased.
“But I’ve seen Leicester win it and nobody in that team knew what it was. So you need to keep on dreaming. You need to keep on believing.
“We have guys also in that team that won it — [Gabriel] Jesus, [Oleksandr] Zinchenko. We have guys that won the title also before in the domestic league.”
Meanwhile, Manchester City boss Pep Guardiola has insisted that he has been left very encouraged by his side’s recent performances despite their slip-up at Nottingham Forest at the weekend.
The Citizens missed the chance to reclaim top spot when they were pegged back and held to a 1-1 draw by Forest away from home on Saturday. However, Guardiola was delighted by his side’s display and also praised his team for their performance against Arsenal last week.
“The team is there, I have the feeling,” Guardiola said on Tuesday ahead of his side’s Champions League clash with RB Leipzig. “We won in London against Arsenal. Maybe we weren’t who we are but we competed really, really well. Without that it’s impossible to achieve that result.
“The way we played that game we had something we normally had in the past like the resilience. The last game against Nottingham Forest was our highest standards, I loved the way we played. We didn’t win because it’s football.
“Sometimes it happens, I don’t have an answer on what happened for this type of situation. But today we trained and yeah, the team is there. That doesn’t mean we’re going to win or get results. But I have a good feeling. Honestly.”