Goalkeeper Petr Cech had an Arsenal league debut to forget as West Ham pulled off an unexpected 2-0 win at the Emirates Stadium.
Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger believes West Ham's additional preparations with Europa League competition contributed to their 2-0 win over the Gunners.
West Ham boss Slaven Bilic praised 16-year-old Reece Oxford for his tireless effort in his side's 2-0 win over Arsenal.
LONDON -- An Arsenal performance that went against all preseason hype and momentum was followed by an Arsene Wenger excuse that went against virtually everything he had said before West Ham won 2-0 at the Emirates.
On Friday, full of 'optimism' on the eve of the game, the Arsenal manager had said that this season, he and his team were aiming to be different and specifically aiming for a good start.
There had been no World Cup or European Championships to exhaust his players and seemingly no cause for the extension of a run which had seen them win just one of their last five games on opening day. 'We're ready to fight and motivated to start well,' Wenger said. 'One of our targets is to start strongly. We had a good preparation, which should give us more confidence.'
The mood had changed after the game, and Wenger no longer seemed to have confidence in that assessment as he went back on his words: 'We could see that, fitness-wise, we are not completely there yet.'
It is a statement that is hard to buy, but the Arsenal manager contradicting himself seemed as muddled as had been his team's performance and defensive organisation.
Even if West Ham boss Slaven Bilic did admit that Europa League qualifying games had helped his own team's condition, that still shouldn't have been enough to leave Arsenal looking so 'unconvincing' and so 'bad at the basics', as Wenger himself admitted.
The likelihood is that this excuse about conditioning was little more than deflection, because the reality might be more difficult to dwell on and discuss. Wenger tried to give off the impression that this was just one of those days that mostly came from the difference in the two teams' preparations, but his pained expression betrayed him.
He knew this was a wasted opportunity, an unnecessarily self-inflicted setback. After Chelsea had dropped points at home to Swansea in a way that is rather unfamiliar to Jose Mourinho's champions, an Arsenal side seemingly full of confidence faced a team they had beaten 10 times in a row and one adjusting to a new manager.
Arsene Wenger's Arsenal are next in action vs. Crystal Palace on Aug. 16.
None of that mattered, though. Rather than take advantage of the perfect situation to set up the perfect start, Arsenal did the complete opposite in a haplessly ironic way with which they have become a little too familiar over the past few years.
Some of the reasons for defeat bordered on self-parody, not least the performance of goalkeeper Petr Cech. Supposedly signed to bring a badly-missing assurance to the Arsenal defence, he had one of his most uncertain performances on English soil and played a very poor role in both goals.
For the first, behind a defence that showed no semblance of organisation for a set-piece, Cech came to punch. Cheikhou Kouyate got to Dmitri Payet's free-kick first and opened the scoring.
For the second, after Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain had so casually given the ball away on the edge of his penalty area, the goalkeeper got his angles wrong as Mauro Zarate rolled the ball into the corner.
Arsenal were again left rolling their eyes but, in the postgame news conference, Wenger said he wouldn't be blaming Cech.
'I haven't spoken to him. I can't see many convincing individual performances today. It's difficult to single one player out.'
The drop in the entire team's level was perhaps of deeper concern than any mishaps or individual mistakes.
'Our performance was not convincing, on the two aspects of our game, going forward and defending,' Wenger admitted. 'We wanted but we were not convincing, not agile, not quick. Our passing was too slow and we were punished.'
It is possible that the manager himself disrupted this -- and took away his team's quickness -- as much as West Ham. Arsenal excelled late last season after discovering the correct configuration in midfield, with Santi Cazorla ahead of Francis Coquelin, and Aaron Ramsey out wide.
On Sunday, Wenger changed things, and it totally changed the pace and fluency of Arsenal's game. There were more sloppy passes and there was much less cohesion. At one point, as they attempted to build a move, Ramsey played a ball out for a throw-in.
They'd lost their edge and something else, which led to one comment from Wenger that really stood out.
'We were a bit nervous and we rushed a bit our game and we didn't always respect the basics. We wanted to be too quick going forward in the first half maybe. I don't think we were too confident. I would rather say too nervous.'
This, frankly, is odd. Why did it happen? Given their preseason and so much of the praise they received after beating Chelsea in the Community Shield, Arsenal's confidence should have been at a peak. How was it so easily disrupted?
It may again come back to something deeper.
Those who work around Wenger say that one constant trend, going back to his title-winning days between 1997 and 2004, has been the way confidence is such a factor to his management. His entire modus operandi is based on building belief in a style until the team are capable of instinctively pulling it off at speed.
It is a strength that has been the source of his greatest successes, but also a weakness that has been at the root of some of his worst failures. When that confidence is disrupted, Arsenal don't seem to have an immediate fail-safe.
That confidence can be built again and Arsenal will likely go on a run again. They can also still challenge for this season's Premier League title because they are still a fine team. Indeed, this result might even be a setback that helps them solve fundamental issues.
Miguel Delaney is a London-based correspondent for ESPN FC and also writes for the Irish Examiner and others. Follow him on Twitter @MiguelDelaney.
It's just that, with confidence such a core issue for this team, the question is this: What could they have done with the perfect start here or even a win of any type? It could really have been a launch pad.
As it is, rather than another rousing point in a surge, Sunday's defeat is something from which Arsenal must recover. Another stop-start. They are not completely there yet and, as Wenger himself said, that doesn't just apply to fitness.