Petr Cech has questioned Arsenal’s mentality ahead of their Europa League final with Chelsea – and suggests there is not enough pressure at the club.
The 37-year-old, who is likely to start in goal for the Gunners against his former employers on Wednesday in a game which is LIVE on talkSPORT, noticed a difference in mentality as soon as he left the Blues for the Emirates in 2015.
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Petr Cech won four Premier League titles and a Champions League trophy during his 11 years at the club
Cech said: “At Chelsea, even when we drew at home against a big team, it felt like a funeral in the dressing-room. It was so bad. It felt impossible that we didn’t win.
“But then I came to Arsenal and as much as Arsene Wenger hated losing, he always stayed a gentleman whatever the result. If we won or lost, he just kind of carried on.
“And that was something I’d never experienced before.
“So as strange as it might sound, I think at Arsenal there is not enough pressure.”
However, Cech admits when the pressure is on Arsenal – they win.
The four-time Premier League winner added: “Every time Arsenal really needs to win, we generally win.
“In my first season at the club, we go to Athens in the last Champions League group game needing to win 2-0 and we win 3-0.
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Arsene Wenger ‘always stayed a gentleman whatever the result’, according to Petr Cech
“The following season, when we needed to win our last six games to have a chance of getting into the top four, we win them all.
“This season we went to Napoli and everyone told us ‘oh you are rubbish away and they are brilliant at home’.
“But we won in Naples and how do you explain that? If you can’t perform under pressure, you lose that game.
“When the fire was right behind us and the pressure was pushing us, we generally got the result.”
Arsenal missed out on Champions League football after finishing the 2018/19 Premier League season in fifth place.
Three successive defeats to Crystal Palace, Wolves and Leicester saw Chelsea and Tottenham pip Unai Emery’s men to a top-four spot.
And Cech, who will retire at the end of the season, admits Arsenal need to put more pressure on themselves to succeed in the future.
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Petr Cech believes Arsenal are on the right path under Unai Emery
He said: “This season we go to Everton last month knowing we go third if we win and stay fourth if we lose. So we lose.
“Two weeks later against Wolves it was literally the same situation – and we lost again.
“There was always a cushion and the idea that ‘OK, it’s not such a disaster, we still have another chance.’
“And this is where we dropped the most points. As soon as we think it’s not such a disaster if we don’t win, we drop points.
“So this is the one thing about Arsenal that I think I would change. We need to create more pressure to give everybody something to think about.”
Arsenal will qualify for next season’s Champions League if they beat Chelsea in Baku on Wednesday.
It would cap off a solid debut season under Emery, who succeeded Wenger last summer.
Cech added: “I think the team is on the right track with Unai Emery. He knows what he has in his team and he knows what he wants.
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“The problem is that in our last five league games we literally needed five points to be in the Champions League and somehow in one week we lost to Palace, Wolves and Leicester.
“Even if we’d got one point from each of those games it would still have been enough.
“But we somehow managed to ship three goals in each of them and obviously we kept everybody else alive in the fight for the top four.”
You can listen to Chelsea vs Arsenal in the Europa League final, LIVE on talkSPORT from 8pm on Wednesday, May 29.
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