Porto 2 – 1 Arsenal, not a bad result.
Let down again by poor goalkeeping, Arsenal left the Estadio do Dragão not having changed their record of 0 wins in Portugal. The first goal was down to comedic goalkeeping you won’t even see in the Sunday leagues, the second was a series of comedic moments by an ensemble cast. If last night didn’t make it clear to Wenger that we have a real problem between the sticks then I’m afraid nothing will.
Porto takes advantage of naive Arsenal... again.
As has been the case all to often this season, the goals we let in is not down to poor defending as a team but silly individual errors, simple things that show naivety, poor concentration and lack of experience. Too often we go from dominating the game looking the most likely to score, to falling behind because of a stupid mistake.
We had our chances to score, Diaby on a few occasions failed to pull the trigger, their goalkeeper made some outstanding saves, and we were denied a clear penalty. When the Porto got that second goal, the wind was knocked out of us, heads dropped and you could sense it was over. Suddenly we couldn’t string together 2 passes, we were always beaten to the ball, the life seemed to have been sucked out of everyone in the team.
So what are the positives we take out of that game? An away goal to start with, although with our record this season i don’t think we can hold out for a clean sheet, however I’m positive that we can beat this Porto team by more that 1 goal at the Emirates. Hopefully, I say hopefully because our injury record is second to none, we will have some regular starters back in the squad.
It is worth remembering that we went into that game missing 5 first choice players. Now I know injuries is not an excuse, but if it’s good enough for Barca, then it’s good enough for Arsenal. All I’ve heard since Barca lost on the weekend is how they we missing players due to injury which goes to show that no team, however good they are can survive an extended list of long-term injuries as we’ve had.
As things stand we are still in a good position to move forward in the competition, a win would make life much easier, but then an away win in this stage of the champions league is never easy, just look at the result Real Madrid got at Lyon even after spending upwards of £200m on big name players they still succumbed to a Lyon and that was with all of that expensive talent on the pitch. So I’d keep things in perspective.
What is important is that we rebound from this defeat and win our next game, which thankfully is a home game. Sunderland is the only bottom half team to beat us this season, the boys should put last night’s loss behind them and go all out to regain their mojo with a spanking win on the weekend.
Keep the faith.
