Considering that Atletico Madrid were the hot favourites to win the Europa League (and probably still are!) they were totally dominated by the Gunners and were very lucky to get away with a draw from a Griezmann breakaway. If there had been anyone else in Atletico’s goal then we would definitely had a hatful of goals, but as usual we struggled to get the ball in the back of the net, despite playing against ten men.
Granit Xhaka is sure that we deserved more from such a good performance. “I think we played a great match” the midfielder said. “Atletico had one shot on our goal and scored. It’s unbelievable because we didn’t want that today, we wanted to have a good result at home. But it’s 1-1 and now we must focus on next week.”
Granit is disappointed with the final result, but thinks we just need to do the same thing again in Madrid and hope we have more luck in front of goal. “We know we must score one goal. We must play like we did today, we must focus over 90 minutes, because you can see it’s always dangerous against Atletico. ”
“I’m not one who has an explanation for it now [the final score]. Just after the game it’s very disappointing. I think today we were clearly the dominant side over the 90 minutes. We made chances and I think other teams would have struggled to make as many as we did against Atletico. Unfortunately we couldn’t get the result – a 1-0 would have been enough – but we conceded a silly goal and now we have to go to Madrid and play exactly as we did today… if you look at the game today, you can see that we can compete against Atletico. OK, we had a man more, but we created chances even before the red card. We just need to approach the game in the same way, try to score and then win the game.”
Danny Welbeck feels the same, he is amazed that we didn’t score more! “There were opportunities there for us to score and we’re disappointed with that but it gives us a little bit of positivity going into the second leg knowing we can create chances against a very good side.
“We know we can score against them and we did it tonight so we’re positive going into that game and we know we can create opportunities. Hopefully we can put them in the back of the net.”
If only… If only…. The story of our season! Maybe we can finally get it right in Madrid….
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