Arsenal 0-0 Sporting (Arsenal win 1-0 on aggregate)
EMIRATES – There were no green bottles hanging from the Sporting end – not least because they would never have got them through airport security. This time no plastic taunts, but every bit of the tetchiness, even as Arsenal edged into the Champions League last four.
It is strange to see any European quarter-final in the context of light relief. So emphatic is the desire to win a first Premier League title in 22 years that it can easily be forgotten that Mikel Arteta is trying to end an even longer drought in this competition, which they have never won.
Yet for the first time in their 140-year history, they have reached semi-finals in consecutive years – and that matters, as much for the psychological scars it heals as for the result itself. Saturday’s abject defeat to Bournemouth was wounding; it does not have to become all-consuming.
So we enter into that time of year – April showers, north London nerviness, and the moment in the calendar when Eberechi Eze comes alive. At Crystal Palace, his goalscoring rate through March, April and May was double that for the rest of the season.
This is exceptionally good news for Arteta and terrible news for Phil Foden, who alongside Cole Palmer is the most likely English No 10 to be battling with Eze for that final spot in Thomas Tuchel’s World Cup squad – on the assumption Jude Bellingham and Morgan Rogers’ places are assured. On this evidence, Tuchel surely cannot leave Eze behind, even if he began to flag before his substitution.
Limited to 16 league starts so far, he has only been able to show fleetingly the kind of nonchalant effervescence with which he lit up Selhurst Park. With Arsenal’s first leg lead a slender one, however, he also offered the levels of discipline that elude this fading iteration of Foden. The latter needs to operate in a freer role that Tuchel is unlikely to free up on his behalf.
A place on the plane arguably means most to Eze, a part of England’s last Euros squad yet still haunted by cruel memories of 2021, when he received the text of his first major tournament call-up on the same day he ruptured his Achilles. He had to wait two years for another breakthrough.
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Should Odegaard be fit for the weekend against Manchester City, Eze has to keep his place by moving left. There is still a danger that Erling Haaland will gorge on the kind of openness Sporting very nearly exploited.
Too often Eze was the only proactive thinker in red – after three defeats in four, that is understandable, if not excusable. Viktor Gyokeres froze in the headlights, hauled off before the hour. David Raya’s jitters were so nearly costly.
For now, Arsenal: welcome to the edge of history, where Atletico Madrid await. Everybody else: welcome to Eze season.
