Unai Emery said he could understand the frustration with Arsenal’s lame defeat at Everton that manifested itself in Mesut Özil throwing a jacket towards Marco Silva.
The Everton manager denied he was Özil’s intended target, with the jacket thrown from the substitutes’ bench as Silva and Emery argued over Shkodran Mustafi’s cynical foul on Dominic Calvert-Lewin late in Arsenal’s 1-0 defeat at Goodison Park. Emery had taken issue with Silva encroaching on his technical area before the former Germany midfielder, withdrawn following another anonymous display, hurled his jacket towards Everton’s coaching staff.
Silva dismissed the incident while the Arsenal manager played down the exchange with his opposite number. “Mustafi arrived late in this action and I think it was a yellow card,” he said. “I spoke to Silva because he comes in my space. No problem.”
Emery was more concerned with his team’s poor performance at Goodison Park as Phil Jagielka’s first goal since April 2017 meant Arsenal remaining in fourth place. He admitted overall frustration with his team’s failure to strengthen their claim on third was justified, moreover.
“I think generally we are well,” added the Arsenal manager, whose team had been on a seven-game unbeaten run in the league. “I don’t think we are very bad. It is a bad result and not a good performance but we are fourth.
“We lost one big opportunity and also today we didn’t show our best performance. We didn’t impose our gameplan but we are being consistent, and we can also be together, feeling together and with some spirit, but some frustration with the result can also come to us. We knew it was going to be very difficult today but we are going to have chances in the next matches and it is still in our hands to take the chances to be in the top four.”