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Unai Emery has said he has a two-step plan for improving Arsenal's leaky defence, but admitted the lack of clean sheets is his main "disappointment" as Gunners boss so far.
Emery inherited a fragile defence from Arsene Wenger and has been unable to sort that issue out so far, with Arsenal conceding 11 goals in their first six games of the season.
Two of those came late in Thursday's 4-2 win over FC Vorskla in the Europa League after the Gunners seemed to switch off when leading 4-0, denying his side a first clean sheet of the campaign, but Emery said he has a plan to help with the problem.
"First is [to work on] confidence with our defensive players," he said. "Second is working tactically to be more compact. But not only for the defensive players, for the whole team, the first XI and the other players.
"This process needs also time, but it's our first disappointment of the first games this season. I think we need to improve this."
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Arsenal's next opponents are Everton, another team that have struggled defensively so far, and they will be hoping Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang can take advantage of that weakness, especially after the striker rediscovered his scoring form with two goals against Vorskla.
Aubameyang was seen as a contender for the Premier League's golden boot award this season but only has one goal in five league games so far.
Emery, though, said he does not need Aubameyang to carry the entire scoring burden for his team.
"He needs confidence and he needs to continue finding his best performance. But also I have a lot of confidence in [Alexandre] Lacazette," he said. "I am going to work with them, with Lacazette, with Aubameyang, with Danny [Welbeck], and give them my confidence. To do one work collectively to give them the best possibilities in the attacking moment to score."
Arsenal coach Unai Emery James Williamson - AMA/Getty Images
Aubameyang was among a handful of regular starters who played on Thursday as Emery fielded a strong team in the Europa League opener -- a different approach from Wenger, who normally used two entirely separate XIs for the Premier League and Europa League group stage last season.
Emery said he will continue to rotate his squad as midweek games become the norm, but that he has no intention of having separate teams for the league and cup games.
"That's not my first idea. My first idea is to find the best performance each match, and every competition for us is very important," he said. "I am going to choose the best first XI [for every game].
"We don't need 11, we need 20-22 players to find this performance. But we are going to continue thinking each match [about] the best first XI. We need also to do the mix for each match, changing players to give them minutes and confidence, but thinking about the performance."
Thursday's game saw summer signings Bernd Leno, Stephan Lichtsteiner and Lucas Torreira all make their first starts for the club, while Alex Iwobi and Henrikh Mkhitaryan -- who were on the bench in the last couple of league games -- also impressed Unai Emery.
"I think the players played like we want [in order to] take more minutes," he said. "On Sunday I think we will have big options to choose the best first XI."
Source: espn.co.uk