'Over my dead body!' - Mikel Arteta defiant on Premier League title hopes | OneFootball

Mikel Arteta says Arsenal will not throw in the towel despite falling 11 points behind Liverpool in the Premier League title race.

The Reds' advantage was surprisingly increased over the weekend as Arsenal's slip-up at home to West Ham United, courtesy of a 44th-minute Jarrod Bowen winner, was punished 24 hours later with victory Liverpool's win at Manchester City.

The defeat was Arsenal's first at the Emirates Stadium this season and comes at a time when they are missing four important attacking players due to injury. Bukayo Saka, Gabriel Martinelli and Kai Havertz were regularly the club's starting forward three in the early months of the season, with Gabriel Jesus often called upon from the bench to provide additional firepower.

"It's been incredibly satisfying to work every day with the players and the staff to try to overcome certain situations," Arteta told his latest press conference.

"So if somebody tells you at the start of the season, by this time, you have played five times with a red card over half an hour in each of those games, and you have lost this amount of players, what's the bet? You are in the middle of the table, at least, you know, and you are out of the Champions League. That's not the situation.

"So that tells you the resilience, the resources, the ambition that the team has, every individual has and that has been probably my time, one of the proudest moments to work in that sense. The thing is that when you are there, you want more and you want more and you want more. And I'm not going to stop over my dead body.

"We'll stop thinking that way and putting everything that we possibly can to increase the probability of us winning and being better than the opponent and being hitting that performance and those standards constantly, regardless of what happens."

A number of disgruntled Arsenal supporters consider Liverpool to already be the champions elect, but Arteta insisted: "It’s been three days and the perception is different, when we have won, they've tied, later we lose and they win and it continues to change. This is really long, we are there [in the title race]. Obviously, this weekend's game was a hard blow, but we have to get back up, we have to continue."

Arsenal's first chance to get back on the horse comes with a difficult-looking trip to Nottingham Forest on Wednesday. Nuno Espirito Santo's side have lost three of their last four Premier League games but still sit third in the table, while they took points off Liverpool at The City Ground in mid-January.