PORTO, Portugal — Mikel Arteta believes his Arsenal side are detached from the club’s historical catalogue of UEFA Champions League round-of-16 exits, but another one beckons if they cannot embrace the occasion better than this.
The Gunners will back themselves to overturn a 1-0 deficit from Wednesday’s first-leg defeat against Porto, but to do so they must rediscover the poise and purpose that made them heavy favourites before kick-off.
Before Galeno‘s sublime 94th-minute winner, Arsenal were unusually inhibited, bereft of the dynamic football that has come to define them: they failed to register a shot on target in a match for the first time since January 2022, against Nottingham Forest in an FA Cup third round defeat which that Arteta incandescent with rage. He was more considered here, safe in the knowledge they have a chance to rescue the situation in three weeks.
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“Credit to them, they defended well,” said Arteta. “But it’s true, when we got in certain areas we didn’t finish the action or put in the final ball or the right cross. “Now it is clear, it is half time. If you want to be in the quarterfinals you have to beat your opponent and that will be the purpose and the plan, with all our supporters together.”
A raucous Emirates Stadium in the return leg will be a powerful positive in their favour — just as Estádio do Dragão was for Porto tonight — but they have still not won a knockout match in this competition since 2015.
Many of those defeats were characterised by a lack of guile and game intelligence that appeared again here. Only the players can truly answer whether Arsenal’s record of seven consecutive Champions League round-of-16 defeats weighed on their minds — Mohamed Elneny is the only member of that team from their last appearance at this stage, a 10-2 aggregate defeat to Bayern Munich in 2017 — but they were a shadow of their usual selves.
Perhaps inexperience told. Arsenal’s starting 11 boasted a combined total of 16 matches in the knockout stages, all of them made by Kai Havertz. Porto defender Pepê had 47 by himself. The home side were adept at breaking up the game. There were 36 fouls given here, a season-high in the Champions League with Arsenal punished on 22 occasions. It was a point not lost on Arteta.
“It’s something we knew and that we had to prepare,” he said. “It’s something that the referee has to manage. We cannot do anything about it and we’ll have to handle it and play our game. “[But] even from set pieces as well every time we touched somebody it seemed to be a foul before we even kicked the ball. But we will learn and do better.”
The winning goal was the product of both a stunning moment of individual quality from Galeno and a panicked end in which Arsenal made one too many mistakes. Gabriel Martinelli gifted possession back to Porto by playing a careless pass intercepted by Otavio. Declan Rice then stood off Galeno as he gathered himself and took aim, firing a superb long-range effort past goalkeeper David Raya. It all looked a little naïve.
