Following a 1-0 loss to Nottingham Forest, which handed the Premier League championship to Manchester City, Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta has acknowledged that he needs to do more to boost his players' morale.
With their loss on Saturday, City were crowned champions for the third consecutive year, extinguishing whatever chance the Gunners had of winning a surprise trophy.
Thomas Partey was switched to right-back and Jakub Kiwior was shifted to the left in an unusual Arteta formation, and the manager was eager to accept blame for Arsenal's loss after the game.
"First of all, congratulations to Manchester City on winning the championship, but it is a sad day for us," he remarked. We must now accept the fact that we handed up a goal today because we lacked the ability to break them down. We could have played for three hours and yet not finished.
"I accept the responsibility since it is mine. Sport is terrific when it's beautiful, and bad when it's not.
"The number of goals we've allowed in recent games has cost us, but we can't place the blame elsewhere. In the past several weeks, we haven't performed as well as a team as we could have.
It's football, folks. It is a very sad day because we have been working for that goal for 11 months and have won so many days. We tried to compete, but we couldn't.
"We must now recover. It hurts a great deal. We have a challenging week ahead of us, so I need to find a way to motivate the guys.
Goalkeeper Aaron Ramsdale added to BBC Sport's analysis of the match: "The dust won't settle until the summer. Although we are quite dissatisfied in how things turned out, we are proud of how hard we worked.
"In six seasons, just one team has defeated Manchester City to win the title. But it was our own fault; we made individual mistakes in contests we ought to have won. We had a chance to win those games.
"Thanks to Forest, they were in a life-or-death struggle. We were aware of the nature of the game. We just weren't able to dissect them. We failed to capitalize on that crucial moment, and the counterattack penalized us. We tried to push through them repeatedly, but we were unsuccessful.
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