Rage, anger, frustration. A bad feeling in the tummy. Mikel Arteta felt the emotions churn, these his words as he tried to process it all. And this was on Saturday night after his Arsenal team had lost 2-1 at home to Bournemouth in the Premier League.
The manager’s idea was to harness the pain, to have it inspire one of the most famous results in club history when they went to Paris Saint-Germain on Wednesday for the Champions League semi-final second leg. In the end, after a tumultuous game, Arteta would be left with pretty much the same sense.
There was pride at how Arsenal played, particularly in the opening 15 minutes, how they carried the fight to the last. But after another 2-1 defeat, this one for a 3-1 aggregate exit, the greatest takeaway for Arteta was a sickness in the base of his stomach.
It will stay with him and, in the bitter aftermath as he faced the press, it overwhelmed him, leading him to push a highly subjective and rather petulant line. Arteta did begin by congratulating PSG, who will face Inter in their second final, seeking to crack the code at long last and win a first European Cup.
But by the time Arteta had finished, he had made perfectly clear that he believed the better team had not won. Arsenal had not only been better over the two legs, they have been the best team in the competition. The depth of the injustice was too much to bear. Arteta even suggested that unnamed PSG members of staff had told him Arsenal deserved to advance.
That cohort, presumably, did not include the manager, Luis Enrique, who counts Arteta as a friend from their days together as Barcelona players. “Sorry, Mikel, that’s simply not true,” was the gist of what Luis Enrique wanted to get across.
Why did Arteta make the claim? Because it was the way he had seen and lived the matches, and when Arteta believes something, he truly believes it. He will point to the pair of one-on-one chances that Arsenal missed in the first leg or, more precisely, which were saved by Gianluigi Donnarumma. He will point to the three fine stops that the PSG goalkeeper made in the return. Also, to the misses by Declan Rice early in the second tie and by Bukayo Saka towards the end.
Arsenal should have scored more, a contention supported by the expected goals (xG) statistic, which had them on 5.11 over the two legs; PSG on 3.08. Arsenal’s xG in game two was 3.14, which was the most against PSG in a Champions League tie all season.
Yet the xG calculation for PSG seemed baffling, given how Bradley Barcola and Gonçalo Ramos, on as substitutes, missed massive chances in the closing stages of the first leg. Désiré Doué had earlier drawn an excellent save out of David Raya. Then, in the return, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia hit a post, Barcola blew another presentable opening and Vitinha missed a penalty.
Did Arsenal playing well at the Parc des Princes somehow make it worse for Arteta? On one level, yes, because it had to heighten his regrets. On another, no, because to have gone with a whimper was plainly his worst-case scenario.
Arteta has opened himself up to criticism with his reaction, much as he did with his comment about Liverpool’s league title win, the bit about how they got the job done with fewer points than Arsenal had accrued as runners-up in the previous two seasons. It did not bear scrutiny, mainly because Liverpool have three games to play – the first against Arsenal at Anfield on Sunday – and they could finish with 91 points. Arsenal had 89 last season; 84 in 2022-23. Better to wait until it is done and dusted before saying this.
It is just Arteta; passionate, blinkered. He puts so much energy and intensity into everything and the flipside can be that it spills into the wrong kind of look when there is an unwanted result. Arsenal were good in Paris; they had their spells, too, in the first leg. But did anybody think that PSG did not deserve to progress?
At the heart of everything is the suffering that the Champions League causes. Take the PSG captain, Marquinhos, who Arteta brought up after Wednesday’s game as an example to his distraught players. It is Marquinhos’s 12th successive Champions League knockout campaign with PSG and he has fallen short on each of the previous 11 occasions, usually in gut-wrenching fashion.
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In 2013-14, Marquinhos’s first season at the club, he was 19 when he came on in the 85th minute of the quarter-final second leg against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge with PSG 3-2 up on aggregate. Cue Demba Ba’s late strike which got Chelsea through on away goals. Fast forward to last season and PSG’s semi-final second leg at home to Borussia Dortmund, a tie in which they hit the woodwork four times before going out. Marquinhos could not believe it. Between times, he played in the notorious Remontada game against Barcelona in the last 16 in 2016-17.
“Eleven times Marquinhos has had to go down and then back up,” Arteta said. “So look at somebody with that trajectory and learn. You want to be in this sport and competing and being very close to the trophy, you better be able to deal with that. It hurts but you have to deal with it.”
There is surely something in the notion that teams must lose first to win later in the Champions League; the anguish is a prerequisite. When PSG lost at Bayern Munich in the fifth game of this season’s league phase – their third defeat of it – they faced a battle to qualify. How their fortunes have turned.
“If you tell me three matches before the end of the group stage that the target is the final …” Nasser al-Khelaifi, the PSG president, said. “Then, it was just to qualify for the playoff round. But what I have felt and smelled between the players, the coach, the sport adviser, the fans, everybody is something so special.
“Luis Enrique is the best manager in the world. When I first spoke to him [before appointing him in the summer of 2023] he told me: ‘You’re going to see your team playing amazing football, you’re going to enjoy it.’ And he’s done it.”
Arsenal are gearing up for a big summer, when Arteta will be backed by the board in the search for the reinforcements he needs – namely a defender, a midfielder (Martín Zubimendi from Real Sociedad is a key target), a winger and a striker. The squad is short of the very highest level.
Before that, Arsenal must ensure they finish in the top five, securing a return to the Champions League. After Liverpool, they play Newcastle at home and Southampton away on the final day. It is not yet a done deal. Arsenal need to shake their heads clear and test the notion that there is more to be learned in adversity.
Source: theguardian.com
