Gavin Cooney

THIS SECOND SEMI-FINAL was never going to come close to the demented agitations of PSG and Bayern, but in fairness it had virtues of its own: mainly that it was a clash of two limited and earnest teams of broadly the same level that ensures Tuesday’s return leg at the Emirates will be the classically fraught fare of knockout football. 

Given the second leg is in London, this was a slightly better result for Arsenal than it was for Atletico, although Arsenal may regret not making more of a first half in which Atletico didn’t turn up. 

The Atleti fans did their best to model the Metropolitano on some Argentine bearpit as toilet roll rained down from the stands pre-game, which would have provided a handy intro for Jorge Valdano if he fancied reprising his infamous “shit on a stick” review of Liverpool and Chelsea’s semi-final 21 years ago. 

But the spectacle did ultimately rise above this admittedly low bar. Declan Rice grinned amid the hostility that greeted Arsenal at the Champions League anthem, and Mikel Arteta’s chief innovation of the night was to swap his position with Martin Zubimendi’s, playing Rice much deeper to perhaps try and conserve some of his flagging energy. 

Rice was generally outstanding, particularly in the first half, adding a little more zip to Arsenal’s build-up play while snuffing out Atleti’s rare forays forward. But the rest of Arsenal’s attacking play looked painfully familiar. Their long spells of possession sometimes put you in mind of someone struggling to parallel park: having faffed about without success, they withdraw by going back to their centre-backs to start over again from another angle. 

The goal came from a set piece of a kind, Viktor Gyokeres slamming in a penalty after he was bumped clumsily in the back by David Hancko. Gyokeres really is the quintessential Arsenal player: anemic and diffident in open play; ruthlessly assertive on set pieces. 

Viktor Gyokeres. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

Diego Simeone reacted to the first-half non-performance by hooking his son and introducing Le Normand: exchanging a winger for a centre-back is not the kind of thinking you’ll see at the Allianz Arena next week, but it effected a positive change.  Marcos Llorente was released from right-back as Atletico effectively mirrored Arsenal’s formation in build-up – a midfielder dropping deep alongside two centre-backs – which pushed their full-backs higher and Ademola Lookman narrower, where he got closer to Julian Alvarez, Antoine Griezmann, and goal. 

Alvarez’ equaliser came from another Uefa penalty, which penalises hands rather than handballs. Like Alphonse Davies last night, the ball kicked off Ben White’s leg and then against his hand. It couldn’t possibly have been deliberate, but VAR has improved the game to the point of ignoring this critical part of the original rule. 

Atleti were unfortunate not to score again from there, with Griezmann hitting the bar and Lookman wasting a series of golden chances by blasting the ball blindly at David Raya. His is a rare name that echoes the anguished instructions of his attacking coaches: Ademola: Look, man! 

Arsenal admirably did not wilt under pressure, and wrestled back a measure of control through Eberechi Eze, introduced in place of Martin Odegaard. When he got to a pass into the box ahead of the hapless Hancko and went down having been clipped, the referee pointed to the penalty spot. This is a stonewall penalty to those of us who have been Premier League-pilled, but Uefa are running a mercurial VAR operation, and so the decision was overturned. We saw similar baffling overturns against PSG and Liverpool in each of the legs of their quarter-final: when we chide the standard of the Premier League by saying the best in Europe are playing a different sport, Uefa’s refereeing philosophy is making this snark true in a literal sense. 

While Bukayo Saka looked too rusty to make an impact, Eze offered much more in an attacking sense than Odegaard, but, unlike his captain, he was also more careless on the ball, losing it a couple of times late on to kindle Atleti hopes of a counter attack. This is the conundrum in choosing between both: Odegaard offers total security in possession and increasingly little in attack; Eze is much more threatening, though occasionally to his own team, too. Arteta could of course pick both in midfield and drop the exhausted Zubimendi…but we know that he would consider this as wanton madness. 

In Mikel Arteta’s highly controlled, accredited game plan, only one of Odegaard or Eze can play in midfield. For all the limits of Arteta’s imposed strictures, it is nonetheless sufficient to see them past this Atletico next week and into a first Champions League final in 20 years, particularly if Alvarez is not fit to play, having limped off tonight. 

If Alvarez is unavailable, then Arsenal should prevail for the right to be considered the rank underdog in the final.