Arsene Wenger has told Arsenal to approach the Premier
League run-in without fear of failure as they fight Everton for fourth place.
Arsenal needed penalties to avoid the nightmare of an FA Cup
semi-final defeat against Championship side Wigan on Saturday - hours after
Everton won at Sunderland to move two points clear in the race for fourth.
In the aftermath of that Wembley win Lukas Podolski said it
would be "a disaster" if Arsenal were to miss out on Champions League
football for the first time since 1997.
But ahead of West Ham's visit on Tuesday night Wenger urged
his players to forget the repercussions of failure and concentrate on getting
the job done in the next five games.
"When you are in a semi-final and you win it releases a
little bit of pressure on the team, but we want to bounce back in the Premier
League," he said.
"We know that one of the main targets - the main target
- is the Premier League, and therefore we want to finish strong. We have a
battle with Everton and it's now down to consistency in the final games.
"Five victories is the target. Do you need it? Nobody
knows, but the target is of course to win every game.
"We just want to not imagine the consequences of not
doing it, what you want is just to focus on doing it."
Arsenal's league form is poor with just one win in six
games, and Podolski, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Nacho Monreal will all need
assessing before the West Ham game.
Several key players remain out, but Laurent Koscielny and
Tomas Rosicky could be back and Wenger expects to have Mesut Ozil fit for the
weekend trip to Hull.
Wenger said: "We are slowly getting our players back,
so the squad is not so depleted any more.
"I believe that Everton have difficult games and we
have difficult games, but we want to focus now on what we know we can do.
"We have a more complete squad and we want to win our
games, no matter what Everton does. We want to finish in a strong way.
"We can finish the season well - we can finish in the
top four, we can win the FA Cup - so it's down to how united we will be until
the end of the season, and focused together."
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