Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain: We Played Really Mature Football

Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain played 76 minutes of Liverpool’s victory over Arsenal. He put in a strong shift and is grateful for the opportunities he has been getting to play recently, he said speaking to liverpoolfc.com.

“I’ve been lucky enough to get those opportunities recently, I’ve kept my head down, I’ve worked hard for them, made sure I was ready when the time came. Now it’s just looking forward and keeping the momentum, keep helping the team to achieve all of our goals.

Ultimately, your individual goals kind of work hand in hand with that. If you keep working hard, things fall into place. So, I’ll be working hard for that and we’ll see what happens.”

Liverpool had a slow start, allowing Arsenal to control the tempo initially. But the second half saw a different performance altogether, as Ox highlighted.

“At half-time the manager spoke to us about when we went 1-0 up that we kind of dropped the tempo a little bit and gave them a little bit more possession and joy. So I think in the second half when we went out there, when the goals were going in, it was almost a trigger to not take the foot off the gas.

But you grow in confidence and I think we played really mature football at the end, seeing it out and we kept the ball and controlled the game. We just had to stay focused because we know that Arsenal are really good on the counter-attack and we had to always keep that in mind.”

When asked about Chelsea’s parallel win, he emphasized that the Reds needed their win for more for themselves than for any other reason.

“Of course we were aware of Chelsea’s result today and it was crucial for us to get three points, but maybe more so after the last few results – we needed that for ourselves to get back to winning ways and a good performance as well.”