Yes last night was a very embarrassing final scoreline for Arsenal, but anyone watching could only wonder at the unbelievable performance of the referee who denied us a penalty which would have given us a 2-0 lead, and then changed a yellow for Koscielny into a red under instructions from another official.
That effectively killed our hopes, although I’m under no illusion that we could have won if we still had 11 men on the field. Arsene Wenger made his anger clear in his after-match interview. He said: “I felt that we produced a performance with the spirit and the pride that we wanted. After that the story finishes badly. Personally, I would say that we really put Bayern under pressure and that we were really unlucky tonight because it was 100 per cent a penalty in the first half after the foul on Walcott. I checked it on television.
“In the second half, the referee killed the game. After that, it was very difficult but the referee was very, very powerful for Bayern tonight. At that moment in the game, not only was it not a penalty, but Lewandowski was offside. On top of that, he gave us a red card and that killed us completely. Overall I must say that Bayern are a good side, but tonight they can also say thank you to the decisions of the referee in the second half.
“It leaves me very angry, very frustrated and, because we are in a difficult period, it hurts even more. It’s absolutely unexplainable and scandalous. You look at what really happened, and the guy behind the line gives the penalty and the red card when the referee had given a yellow. Okay we have to take it on the chin and I have to stand up for it, and I will take a lot of criticism, but it doesn’t change my mind. We have to deal with these kinds of situations in this game but that doesn’t make them right.”
This is not the first time that Arsenal have collapsed after losing Koscielny, so Wenger was then asked if it meant that the Gunners can’t compete without their captain on the field and the defence falls apart, and he effectively dodged the question by replying: “It’s difficult when you have to go forward and score goals. You have a deficit of four goals and you’re down to 10 men. If you go forward you can be caught on the counter-attack but if you don’t go forward then people will say, ‘Why did you not at least try to score goals?’ so it’s a difficult situation. It’s an impossible situation.”
I guess it was “mission impossible” from the start to try and win by 4 clear goals against the German giants, and it was made even harder when we had 10 players and Bayern had 12, but to lose 3 games in a row to the same team by the same embarrassing scoreline is not exactly a sign of progress….
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