Arsenal's Per Mertesacker said he "paid no attention" to Troy Deeney's comments - or anyone else's - after the Watford captain accused the Gunners of lacking "cojones" on BT Sport at the weekend.

The veteran defender, making his first Premier League start since April 2016, netted the Gunners' opener at Vicarage Road, but he and his team-mates were masters of their own downfall as the Hornets completed a memorable turnaround in the teatime kick-off.

After the game, Deeney said Arsenal had "backed off" and that Watford "smelled blood" to register their first home win over Arsene Wenger's men in decades.

Those kind of sentiments have been levelled at the Gunners for years, but rarely from players themselves, and Chelsea legend Frank Lampard weighed in to echo the Watford striker's thoughts in his Evening Standard column today.

Mertesacker can at least defend himself as one of the better performers for the visitors on Saturday, but his comments may grate - as Arsenal have clearly not learned lessons from their obvious mentality problems in recent years.

I don’t know what he said,” he told Sky Sports. “I don’t pay attention. Anyways it was after the game I think, so I didn’t watch it.

“We should concentrate on ourselves first of all, there are so many guys involved and so many opinions, which is fine, but we need to focus on ourselves and learn lessons from that.

“If we start to listen to too many people it’s not worth it, honestly, I need to look at myself and think what could have been done better.

“Afterwards, it’s easy to judge and easy to say words and think we are lacking something. We have to think how we can provide better performances, especially away from home, where it gets tight and difficult.

“That is all going on here. I’m not a favourite of listening too much to other guys. I haven’t done that in 15 years, I’m not going to do that in my last year.”