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MOTD: Arsenal 0-2 Barcelona

By on February 23, 2016

Luis Enrique’s gameplan against Arsenal was brilliantly simple.  “I tell them “Abracadabra,” and the magic sparks, that’s all I do,” he joked ahead of the match.

“It’s quite simple, in situations of the game, you don’t have to wish what you would like them to do – because they are already doing it,” he added on a more serious note.  “They press, up front, to get the ball from the opponent, and we work hard so that our midfielders can give them the ball.”

Tonight, Lionel Messi orchestrated a 2-0 win over Arsenal in the first leg of their Champions League Round of 16 tie with a goalscoring man-of-the-match performance at the Emirates. Although the Gunners held Barca goalless until the seventy-second minute, the Blaugranas pounced just when Arsenal were gearing up for a late charge.

“Barcelona master all aspects of the game. As soon as you’re in a bad position, one or two players can punish you,” said Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger, per the Gunners’ official website. “We had two or three opportunities to stop the first goal which we didn’t do because I don’t think we had the right response to the situation that our players faced.

“I’m disappointed because we put a lot of energy into this game. I felt that we lost at the moment that we looked more capable of winning the game, and we also lost it in a way which we could not afford to give them. It’s a bit disappointing to give them the goals that we did, especially the first goal. I feel that we were extremely guilty and have no excuses for that goal.

“We were disciplined defensively but we knew that if we had to keep it at 0-0, we would keep it at 0-0. They are better than us, everybody knows that, but I think we could’ve won the game tonight if we kept the discipline until the end. Once again, like against Monaco [in the Round of 16 last year], exactly the same thing happened. We were caught in exactly the same way.”

Arsenal had the chances to defeat their visitors, but failed to capitalize. Their lack of a difference maker up front was put in sharp contrast by Luis Suarez, Neymar and Messi’s lethality. It was just six minutes when that Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain blew a glorious chance when Hector Bellerin’s blocked effort rebounded right into his path ten yards out from goal. Yet Chamberlain got the ball stuck under his feet and he could only manager to poke a weak effort straight at Dani Alves, who made a lunging block near the goal-line.

“We were impatient in the build-up, we lost balls that we usually don’t and that’s not because Barcelona forced us to do it, but just because we were not precise enough in our passing,” said Wenger.

Petr Cech, who had yet to allow a goal to Barca in six matches prior to tonight, managed to keep the European champions at bay for only so long. On the brink of the half, Suarez headed a powerful effort over the crossbar at the end of a far-post cross and saw Cech block a one-on-one.

On the other side of the half, Andrés Iniesta slid Neymar in down the left and the Brazilian saw a near-post effort saved by Cech with Messi wide open at the far post.

At the other end of the pitch, Olivier Giroud forced Marc-André ter Stegen into an amazing save after rising up and guiding a cross-from the left back across goal towards the bottom-left corner with a towering header, but Messi scored the go-ahead goal on a lethal counter-attack right when Danny Welbeck was about to come on.

He made neat work of the goal and cooly tucked home a late penalty after Mathieu Flamini’s clumsy challenge, just forty-seven seconds after the midfielder had come on as a sub. Neymar should have had a third at the end of a late far-post cross, but Cech somehow beat away the twenty-four-year-old’s header. Nevertheless, the two-goal lead coming back to the Nou Camp “takes Barca “95%” of the way into the Quarterfinals”, in the words of Arsenal boss Arsene Wenger, and leaves Arsenal all but assured of their fifth consecutive exit at the first knockout stage of the competition.

Homepage photo credit: www.postproduktie.nl [CC BY 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

About Alex Morgan

Alex Morgan, founder of Football Every Day, lives and breaths football from the West Coast of the United States in California. Aside from founding Football Every Day in January of 2013, Alex has also launched his own journalism career and hopes to help others do the same with FBED. He covers the San Jose Earthquakes as a beat reporter for QuakesTalk.com and his work has also been featured in the BBC's Match of the Day Magazine.