Having spent 11 years at Chelsea, were you apprehensive about starting afresh? “Last year I realised that the club [Chelsea] had sort of turned the page from me. I knew the manager had made his choice and that this was not for me at this point of my career. If I was new to the club or I had been there two or three years, then you might think: ‘Okay, let’s fight for my place and see what the outcome will be.’ But at my age and after all I’ve done it was like a chapter closing. Sometimes you have to think about yourself, and this was the best thing for me. At 33, I don’t want to just give things time, just to wait and see. So, after all I’d done at Chelsea, I felt it was the right time to move on.” 

You have said before that meeting Arsene Wenger convinced you Arsenal was the right club. Why?
“He introduced me to the vision the club has for the coming years, to the reason why certain things are the way they are now and how they will be next year and the year after. I really liked the project in the way it matches my ambition and motivations. It’s a difficult decision to go from Chelsea to Arsenal, but I believed it was the right decision because I wanted to be part of the Premier League at a club that matches my ambitions. With Arsenal, that all came together.”

Does his longevity at the club give him anything different to other managers?
“In football everything changes fast, so you need to have a clear vision and support from people at the club. Obviously the board and everyone at Arsenal believe in the manager – that’s why he’s still here. It’s not just for the way you are – it must be for the way you work, too. The public only see the game, they don’t see all the things that are happening behind the scenes. So, sometimes, judging people only on the fraction of the time you see them working can lead to different opinions.”

He and your old boss Jose Mourinho have had their differences. Do you see any similarities between them?
“The similarity is that everybody wants to win. If you ask Jose Mourinho or Arsene Wenger if they want to win everything: yes they do. You can see they don’t like losing games, and I think this is something you need to have in you if you want to be successful.”

Is that similarity a reason why they clash?
“It’s more a question for them. But, yes, sometimes two pluses doesn’t make a plus.”

You have won everything in club football. What do Arsenal need to do to go from finishing third and fourth to winning titles?
“We need to be more consistent in the way we put a run together, and avoid the games where you switch off. I think that’s the only thing, because in terms of the quality of the team Kieran McManus/BPI/REX Shutterstock and the motivation of everyone, you can see that we can compete with everybody. But we need to make sure that every game we are 100 per cent consistent and focused. Sometimes this is the hardest part.”

You’ve been at a club that found a winning consistency. What’s the secret?
“You need to make sure you do the basics right in every game. That gives you the platform to build on – and then, if you don’t have a particularly great day, you can make sure you still get the maximum out of it. At Chelsea we had games where we knew it was not going our way, but we managed to get the most out of it, which was a great skill to have. Sometimes you need to stick to the basics and forget about playing the way you want when it’s not going your way. It’s about adapting to the situation better. As I said before, if you go too much with the emotion, you can be punished. I think that’s what happened to us against Olympiakos, with that third goal.”

There has been a lot of head-scratching over the struggles of English clubs in Europe. Do you have a view on it?
“I know from my own experience why. If you look at the game against Olympiakos, the only time they looked like they couldn’t cope was when we played at full intensity. In the European game, there is not the same rhythm, even down to the way the referee blows the whistle more often than in the league and how everybody is kind of cheating with the time. The English teams are so used to playing end-to-end stuff that, when the game slows down, everyone gets frustrated. We always had a problem with the Italians [at Chelsea] because they made us almost fall asleep with the way they walk around. You think: ‘Oh, the game is easy,’ and suddenly you are 3-0 down because you fall into this trap.”

Should teams be prepared better for that?
“We need to be more cautious in European games because every week English teams get caught. We need a change in mentality to make that switch between Premier League and European games. You know it’s going to be more tactical and slower. So you need to make sure that, even if the game goes really slow, you pick up your own intensity. It’s the only way. The other factor is that we spend so much energy on every game in the Premier League that sometimes the teams you play prepare better because they can afford to rest players [in the league]. You can’t do that here. If you want to win it, you have to play every game 100 per cent – no matter what.”

First of all he was a very intelligent player who could analyse very well what was going on during the game,” he told Arsenal Player. “He could use his qualities and intelligence to use them at a optimum level.

“He was a mixture of a laid-back player who was very fierce and strong pride. He could always find that when he was bad like he had a bad ankle you wondered if he could play at the day of a competition.

“This is the guy that always found the resources to be at his best. This was the brand of the back four when I arrived, they were all the same and like that. You wondered sometimes during the week if they would be available but they always surprised you and they were always much better than you predicted they would be.”

First of all he was a very intelligent player who could analyse very well what was going on during the game,” he told Arsenal Player. “He could use his qualities and intelligence to use them at a optimum level.

“He was a mixture of a laid-back player who was very fierce and strong pride. He could always find that when he was bad like he had a bad ankle you wondered if he could play at the day of a competition.

“This is the guy that always found the resources to be at his best. This was the brand of the back four when I arrived, they were all the same and like that. You wondered sometimes during the week if they would be available but they always surprised you and they were always much better than you predicted they would be.”