Arne Slot makes Arsenal title prediction ahead of Aston Villa vs Liverpool

Arne Slot believes Arsenal will hold off Manchester City’s challenge to win the Premier League title this season.

City are now two points behind Arsenal with two games remaining following their 3-0 win over Crystal Palace on Wednesday night.

Arsenal will extend their lead to five points if they beat Burnley at home on Monday before City travel to Bournemouth in their penultimate league game next Tuesday.

Mikel Arteta’s side are away to Palace on the final day of the Premier League season on May 24, while City are at home to Aston Villa.

Speaking at his press conference on Thursday, Slot was asked about Liverpool’s playing style this season and in his response, the Dutchman claimed that Arsenal’s defensive resilience has played a key role in their title challenge this season.

‘This is what football brings, the intention is, as I said after the game, is never to end up in low block but we are playing Premier League and Champions League sometimes you face teams who are also very comfortable and very good on the ball, Chelsea are definitely one of them, as three, four or five others, they like to have ball possession, I can also turn it around, I don’t think it was Chelsea’s intention to be constantly in their own half in the second half, I would be completely surprised because that’s not their style of play,’ Slot said.

‘But sometimes the other team is better, or has a phase of the game where they are better and then you have to defend.

‘The team that is going to win the league, at least I assume, I think Arsenal is going to win the league, is a team that has large spells in a game where they have to defend in a low block and they do that really well by the way, that’s also one of the reasons why they’re going to win the league.

‘You have to sometimes accept you don’t want this but if the other team has the ball but you have to defend, which is quite common in football.

‘You defend with 11 players, that’s the new reality in football, ideally you do it high up the pitch but if that’s not possible because the other team is having a good spell then you have to try to keep a clean sheet.

‘That’s where we have not been good enough this season, the moments when we have to defend, when we have a spell of 10, 15 minutes because it was not much longer than 10, 15 minutes aganst Chelsea, for the rest of the game I think we were the dominant team. But in that 10, 15, 20 minutes, I don’t know exactly, we conceded a goal and that’s also a worry. And then in the other minutes when we are the better team we struggle to either create enough chances from being the better team and if we have the chances we struggle to score the goals that we should score if you look at chances created, especially compared to last season because I don’t think we had much more chances than last season but last season we were much better to be able to convert the to goals.

‘Of course we can do something about that and we try to and you saw this because the second half [against Chelsea] was completely different than the first half. But it’s a situation where Chelsea had the ball, they could find their No.6s a lot, could go to the end phases of our attack, and the moment we won the ball back with 11 players behind the ball, we didn’t have the player to play into and come off.

‘It’s so normal if you watch the Premier League, you constantly see this everywhere. Because the league has become so strong that every team in any game has a spell in 10, 15 minute spell where one of the two teams is better. You can also look at it differently and say we’ve been, I don’t think I exaggerate, over 70, 80 per cent of the time of the games we’ve played we’ve been the better team. I think I saw a stat we’ve been the most in the final third of every team in the Premier League but that doesn’t lead to enough chances and we are aware of why that is.’

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