Following a 1-0 loss to Nottingham Forest, which handed the Premier League championship to Manchester City, Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta has acknowledged that he needs to do more to boost his players' morale.
With their loss on Saturday, City were crowned champions for the third consecutive year, extinguishing whatever chance the Gunners had of winning a surprise trophy.
Thomas Partey was switched to right-back and Jakub Kiwior was shifted to the left in an unusual Arteta formation, and the manager was eager to accept blame for Arsenal's loss after the game.
"First of all, congratulations to Manchester City on winning the championship, but it is a sad day for us," he remarked. "Now that we have to face the facts, we were guilty of conceding a goal today,"
We must now accept the fact that we handed up a goal today because we lacked the ability to break them down. We could have played for three hours and yet not finished.
"I accept the responsibility since it is mine. Sport is terrific when it's beautiful, and bad when it's not.
"The number of goals we've allowed in recent games has cost us, but we can't place the blame elsewhere. In the past several weeks, we haven't performed as well as a team as we could have.
It's football, folks. It is a very sad day because we have been working for that goal for 11 months and have won so many days. We tried to compete, but we couldn't.
"We must now recover. It hurts a great deal. We have a challenging week ahead of us, so I need to find a way to motivate the guys.
Goalkeeper Aaron Ramsdale added to BBC Sport's analysis of the match: "The dust won't settle until the summer. Although we are quite dissatisfied in how things turned out, we are proud of how hard we worked.
"One team has defeated Manchester City to win the title in six seasons. However, we made the mistakes on our own, making mistakes in games we ought to have won. We had the opportunity to win those games.
They were battling for their lives, thanks to Forest. We were aware of the kind of game it would be. We just couldn't dissect them. We were penalized during the counterattack because we missed that special moment. We kept trying to push through them, but we were unsuccessful.
