Playing ten men made it harder for Arsenal?

Arsenal started the game last night in lively fashion, and Atletico seemed to have a policy of hacking down our players at every opportunity so it was little surprise that they went down to ten men so quickly.

But after that the Spanish side spent most of the time defending like hell, and according to Arsene Wenger, it didn’t help us at all, despite having the lions share of possession. “Yeah, it’s frustrating.” the Boss said. “We had not to force it. We were 1-0 up and the second goal could have come even in the last five minutes.

“You have to stay 1-0 up and after that, everything is open. They are a team who defend well, we know that. They have one of the best defensive records in Europe, you could see tonight that’s no coincidence. But we had the chances. Once they were down to 10 men, it destroyed a bit the flow of the game and it was not to our advantage.”

I think it was a big advantage myself and with the amount of chances we created we should have put the game to bed many times, but instead we gave away a soft goal and now have a mountain to climb in the second leg. At least Wenger is under no illusions what we have to do next week in the return leg. “The only advantage of that result is we know exactly what we have to do over there. We have nothing to lose. We have to go there and really play to win the game.”

Maybe we can go down to ten men and make it harder for Atletico next week!

Darren N

21 Comments

  1. going down to ten men in Europe? that worked well for us last time. 5-1 defeat. But then again, we lost 5-1 with 11 men on the field too. Our defense just not good enough.

  2. we r out of europa already.even the best teams get pissed in atletico away match.we will not score there a single goal, they will score 2-3 goals there

  3. It made the ref overlooked some of the fouls against us in the box area, so it did have it’s negative effects, and Atletico didn’t want to attack, they just wanted to make sure we didn’t score goals until. Everything was fine until we made the defensive errors as usual.

  4. Just finished watching the A League semi final between the team I follow in Australia, Newcastle United who came from one goal to beat Melbourne City 2:1. Melbourne City is a feeder club for Manchester City and are sponsored by Etihad.
    If you get a chance watch the first Newcastle goal by 19 year old Riley McGree, who scores from a “scorpion kick”.
    Newcastle United have gone from last place (“wooden spoon”) last season to be in their first grand final in 10 years.
    Now COYG.

  5. Let’s be a bit realistic the day after the night(mare)before.The team played well.We created chances that we couldn’t take but you cannot reasonably day any one single player had a bad game.The goal conceded is just so typical of how we have defended as a team for too long but it was the only mistake we made on the night and as always concede from it.But there is no faulting the commitment and effort.The players were up for the game and we fell short against a team who produced a master class in defending away from home in a European tie and were masters in running down the clock.
    Do we have it in us to get the result in Madrid?Im just not sure.Mikki If fit will give us a better balance but as always we come back to the defence.Will Wenger change to a 5/3/2 to give them something different to think about and make us hopefully a bit tighter or go with what we had last night?
    I don’t know why but I’m confident we CAN turn this around but it all comes down to how well we defend

    1. The problem is “arsenal way” is to easy to defend for a well organized defense…why? Because we are too predictable and slow…we need to be more direct…liverpool would score 4 goals yerterday. Our attacks were always by the flanks looking for a header, when we have a short 9 in laca (who plays well and get his socks off yesterday), with bad crosser in bellerin and with bad long shot players for the second ball in ozil…plus we were playing against godin and a good in the air defense…thats shows u we are short of ideas abd tactics…we are not new on this since stoke a many small teams use that tactic against us..so we play vs a 10 men team, with a known and obvious tactic on that condition and we failed…i knew we would get a draw when, being in our momentun, we were not be able to close the match 10 min after laca goal

  6. We started off alright…. playing well, I actually thought we might do this. Then the sending off…. I thought oh surely we have to score at least 2 & not concede! Silly me… I should have known!! Gutted

    1. Sunday is about resting players unfortunately. We still have to go to Athletico with a full fit squad and that means Sunday is likely to be a hammering with Sanchez scoring against us no doubt!

      If we could have just taken our chances yesterday we would have been in better mental and physical state for next week but hey, this is Arsenal!! 🙁 We screw things up proper!

      Why oh why can they not learn from mistakes!? It’s like a nightmare I can’t wake up from..

  7. There was no reason to concede. Atletico massive favorites now, and Arsenal bottled it again when it seemed impossible. But dont worry ,all the players will get on social media and say they will do better next time. Something they have not done the entire season. Let’s just get through Thursday and then look forward to next season. This squad is just no good. Thought the result would look better the next day but still looks like a giant mountain to climb.

    1. There was no reason to concede but Kos had a different idea..

      He was thinking, “If I can screw this up for us (again), I’m sure finally convince Arsene he has been wasting the last 10 years of lives”!

      Job done then Kos, you muppet!!!

  8. I know where he’s coming from, it’s one on one chances that are harder to come by with the box packed like that. We played very well everyone seemed on it and it looked like it was whether or not one nil or two nil. Monreal to play him on like that is just so lazy, he should have expected them to try that, then Koscielny just rolling over was really hard to take. Am sick of hearing about their character from Wenger when it’s a simple thing like that which ruins us so easily, all the work the boys put in for those players back there to just mess it up on them. Lets hope that Atletico away is when we play our best game of season. Lacazette was immense, even raising the crowd in Atletico half, he didn’t deserve his teammates to let him down like that.

  9. With a 1-o result we had a 50% chance in Madrid

    1-1 probably only a 10% chance, but hey ho you never know.

    1. Considering how bad Wenger is with tactics when we are leading on the first-leg, 1-1 is better for us than 1-0 (Except it’s 2-0 or more)
      With a lead Wenger goes to defend away, even to a team we could well beat even away (CSKA and I remember Napoli in Champions League)
      If it were 1-0, we would go defend it and Ath. will cancel it out under 20 mins and the boys wouldn’t be able to pick up themselves
      1-1 is only better than 1-0 for us, but 2-0 would have been cool
      This way we would go play them, we would score – but our defence has made us know now that we’ll be outscored in the end

  10. I can praise Arsene when he refused to speak about the individual errors (esp. Koscielny’s).

  11. The negativeness comes from us the fans it starts from the media and then the /fans us ) we start the bad and negative attitude which gives the players no confidence .. Just for once get behind our team and you will see the difrence it should be support your team no matter what we can make that extra man ,, Do you remember when we played Barcelona a few years ago the attmosfear was out of this world we won 2-1 I think van Percy and the russian scored I forget his name that is why Liverpool do much better than us fantastic Atmosphere always ..if next week you go to Madrid just try been louder for our team they will beat Spanish club that is what we need …..

  12. I remember Sporting Lisbon gifting Ath. M. 2 goals after making useless blunders even though Sporting played better on both Legs
    Watching Koscielny yday, I realize it will be the same, we are technically better but we will gift them goals
    Having absolutely nothing to do for 90mins, our defence still gifted a goal
    In the second leg, they’ll have great loads of work to do – therefore more gifted goals though we will outplay them and we’ll score

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