Mikel Arteta believes his Arsenal side need to become “tricky and street-wise” if they want to compete with the best teams.

The Gunners were given a lesson in the dark arts by Porto on Wednesday night as they fell to a 1-0 defeat in the first leg of their Champions League last-16 tie.

Newcastle, who Arsenal face on Saturday night, adopted a similar approach at Emirates Stadium last year when they held Arteta’s side to a 0-0 draw and could do the same again.

But Arteta wants his players to develop their own edge as they bid to keep pace in the title race.

“I don’t know if it is [being] a bad guy, but you have to be tricky, you have to be smart, you have to be street wise and you have to try to take advantages in every situation,” said Arteta. “[The players] know that.

“That’s a thing that has to be developed - you don’t have it, that’s for sure. The best teams, the best players, they have that.

“We certainly can develop a lot of things and those experiences [against Porto] are really relevant to judge whether we were or we weren’t.

“Just because a goal [was scored], I don’t think it’s that fair and I was very clear with them about it because I believed that they did a lot of things right.

“But managing games and things like that, we can still improve. But in a year’s time for sure, we can still improve, and we can improve in our build-up phase, and we can improve in our restarts. We can improve in many areas.”