Yes, Arsène Wenger, we are looking at you. Twelve months on from his Taxi Driver moment, when the Arsenal manager found himself sliced by the knife-edge tension of his professional life, he was pressed to centre stage at the club’s training ground and asked to outline the solution to a familiar and fiendish problem.
Bayern Munich are in town, for the Champions League last-16 first leg on Wednesday night, and it was impossible to ignore the echoes of history. It was Bayern who beat Arsenal at the same stage of last season’s competition and, in many respects, reinforced an uncomfortable reality.
In the preceding seasons, Arsenal had fallen to Barcelona and Milan in the last 16. The failures had been glorious; there was much to like about patches of their performances over the two legs and there were the inevitable, tantalising imponderables. What if Nicklas Bendtner had scored his breakaway chance at Camp Nou? How did Arsenal not score one more time in the second leg at home to Milan, and so complete an outlandish comeback? The record books simply recorded the defeats.
Against Bayern last season, there was first-leg disaster on a par with the 4-0 defeat at Milan in 2012, when they crashed 3-1 at the Emirates. The subsequent 2-0 win in Munich restored pride and it served as a catalyst to an impressive finish to the Premier League season, but it still added up to an aggregate defeat. Arsenal’s inability to retain their focus for 180 minutes at this point in club football’s biggest tournament has been chronic.
They begin the rematch against Bayern as yappy underdogs. Never mind that Bayern won everything last season, including the European Cup, they have so far carried all before them this time out. Under the new manager, Pep Guardiola, they lost the German Super Cup to Borussia Dortmund and the final (largely meaningless) tie of their Champions League group to Manchester City. And that has been it. They are 16 points clear at the top of the Bundesliga and into the semi-finals of the German Cup.
“You cannot say the opposite,” Wenger said, when asked whether Bayern are the best team in the world. “They win every game. They have won the World Club Cup and the Champions League so I would have to say yes.”
Wenger stopped short of describing them as the best team he has faced. That accolade, he said, had to go to the Barcelona of 2009-10, who played football that was seemingly from a different planet during the first half of the Champions League quarter-final first leg against Arsenal at the Emirates. Arsenal somehow escaped with a 2-2 draw before losing in Barcelona to four goals from Lionel Messi. “The first half hour at the Emirates was the best I’ve seen,” Wenger said. That, of course, was Guardiola’s Barcelona.
Yet Bayern are hardly sloppy seconds and Per Mertesacker, Arsenal’s Germany defender, said on Tuesday that they were “untouchable.” He had told the Guardian two weeks previously that under Guardiola Bayern had raised their levels, which were already the best in Europe. “They have the Barça style in their mind from four or five years ago, when they smashed everyone,” Mertesacker said.
There is, though, a stronger look about Arsenal these days. They faced Bayern in last February’s first leg on the back of an FA Cup fifth-round home defeat by Blackburn Rovers of the Championship, a result that Wenger called the lowest point of last season and left him feeling hunted. His pre-Bayern press conference that time was made memorable by his eyeballing of a reporter and the question: “Why do you look at me?”
This time Arsenal enter after an FA Cup fifth-round home win over Liverpool, bang in contention for the title and rubbing up from one competition to the next in a good way. The Emirates has become a fortress, with Arsenal unbeaten there in 13 matches, a run of 10 wins, three draws and only two goals conceded. Mertesacker’s central-defensive partnership with Laurent Koscielny has been a major factor, together with Mathieu Flamini’s work in defensive midfield.
“We were too nervous at the beginning of the game [against Bayern last season],” Wenger said, with a nod towards the Blackburn upset. “We also wanted to level it too much at 2–1 and we conceded the third through a counter. It’ll be down to our defending on Wednesday. Their main force is going forward. They have five or six players who can create a chance at any moment.”
“We have spoken about the importance of staying in the game,” Jack Wilshere, the England midfielder, said. “Even if it is 0-0, it is a good chance to qualify as the away goal is massive. We have got to be a bit more intelligent this year and stay in the game.”
Arsenal have coped with psychological scrutiny of the most intense nature since the first week of the season while they wonder, perhaps optimistically, whether Bayern’s strolls thus far might have led them towards complacency.
Wilshere also noted how Arsenal had learned to win ugly at times and it is a discussion point to consider whether their mentality has been shaped by their burgeoning German contingent.
Mesut Özil joined Mertesacker and Lukas Podolski at the club last September, while Serge Gnabry has broken through this season and the prodigy, Gedion Zelalem, is German-born. Wenger attempted to sign Julian Draxler last month and if the chief executive, Ivan Gazidis, considers Bayern to be the benchmark in commercial terms, even the incoming Arsenal kit deal is with Puma, a German manufacturer.
Wenger is expected to prefer Tomas Rosicky to Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain in his chief selection teaser. Arsenal are gunning for a breakthrough.
The Guardian.
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