Champions League Review - Arsenal actually do something good

Arsenal shock everyone with their excellence

For once, Arsenal were lucky. They weren’t lucky with the victory. It was comprehensive and assured, and it came from some excellence from Mesut Ozil, who started the match with a tight calf. It didn’t twang. And that’s where Arsenal were fortunate. This is the first time in recent weeks that they escaped without yet another injury to one of their players. Olivier Giroud went down, twice, and there were concerns that he would be the latest player, following Santi Cazorla and Alexis Sanchez, to run into the ground and beaten by a more physical opponent.

It had appeared that, having lost their opening two stages of their Champions League game, that they had thrown it away. But a remarkable victory against Bayern Munich turned things around, and gave them a chance - they took it. Even Joel Campbell played well.

The season has been an odd one for Arsenal. They started well, the fans overreacted and believed that success was finally on its way. The sceptics waiting for the strains and failures, and they eventually came. They lost to West Brom and drew to Norwich. But after those league games they beat Dinamo Zagreb and then Sunderland. They didn’t collapse spectacularly, they basically slogged on despite their own inconsistency and self-inflicted misfortune.

Their qualification left Manchester United as the only club to fail to manage it. They remain in the top four, and presuming Leicester City fall off, then they can consider themselves the leaders of the serious contenders for the title. They have, once again, shown all their fans and everyone watching that being excellent isn’t beyond them on the occasions it is required. They have the perfect chance - in the league if not in this year’s Champions League - to show everyone else that they can do it more than once or twice a season.

Chelsea do just enough, which is enough for Mourinho to keep his job for now

It wasn’t the greatest match for Chelsea, but in the scheme of their season, it didn’t have to be. The most important thing was that they qualified, and they managed it.

Porto are not the strongest opponents, but they have the players capable of beating Chelsea at their lowest. For much of this season, Chelsea have been at their lowest, and that’s why qualification was still at risk with one match of the group stages to go, and why there were rumours that Jose Mourinho would be sacked should the club fail to qualify.

Mourinho had laid the groundwork for this victory years ago. It was made at Real Madrid. His isolation of Iker Casillas, and Casillas’ lack of resilience in the face of his pressure, has left him a broken ‘keeper. He’s still occasionally excellent, but he’s still prone to significant error. He has part-time, but persistent yips. He cannot really be trusted in matches, and that’s most crucial weakness for a player.

The win came despite Chelsea’s usual failings. Diego Costa strolled around the pitch objectionably, as he does for much of his games, and presumably as he does at home too. Branislav Ivanovic has still to learn how to stand up for the full hour and a half. The midfield is slow. Eden Hazard has to be told to run around, which you might imagine was something that a footballer would know to do himself. But as the failings were traditional, so were the successes, with the brilliant Willian scoring the second for Chelsea. They have, despite their loss against Bournemouth, started to improve slowly in recent weeks. If they can keep up a gradual shift up the league, and add a couple of players less mardy than the current crop, and Mourinho might be able to rescue his season.

Manchester United are managed by a terrible coach

The last game that Manchester United played in this season’s Champions League might have been the most hilarious calamitous, but it wasn’t the most significant when it came to their failure to progress. There were two especially poor games, both of which took United down.

The first was the opening loss to PSV Eindhoven. The defeat was bad enough, as it started Louis van Gaal back on the path to believing conservatism was the essential ingredient of any of his performances. So it has been in all competitions. Possession, no risk, safety-first team selections. In the league, it has kept them near the top of the league, largely in part because of the poverty of the competition. They might not win many, but neither is anyone else. But it was worst because it took Luke Shaw out for most of the season.

Until the injury, Shaw had teamed up well with Memphis, and they appeared to be getting on well on the pitch and off it. Then Shaw had his leg snapped by a reckless Hector Moreno, and Memphis couldn’t adjust to the demands of the tougher Premier League. With the rest of the side struggling for goals, because of Van Gaal’s timid approach to football, there was no opportunity to give him chance to adjust.

And United stumbled on in Europe, with each misstep increasing the pressure on the side to perform. In domestically, United kept getting away with it, by and large, but accruing more and more injuries, and taking fewer and fewer risks. Which meant that ahead of the game with Wolfsburg, United had injuries to Wayne Rooney, Morgan Schneiderlin, Antonio Valencia, Ander Herrera, Phil Jones and Shaw. And by that point, United were required to beat Wolfsburg, knowing that while a draw may have given them a chance, it wasn’t worth risking it.

So Van Gaal had his side, depleted by injury and starting with an approach - trying to actually score a few goals - that they were unused to, at the same time unsettled by extensive injuries to their defence. It should be no surprise that they conceded, but even that has been misinterpreted. Defending from set pieces is not hampered by an attacking nature, so anyone who claims that United lost because they were too attacking is a fool, it is because they didn’t head away two balls into the box, nothing more than that. On another day, with more practice at attacking, the forwards might have converted more of the chances and they might have progressed. But if they had more practice at attacking throughout the season, they would have already qualified.

This was a defeat built on the desires and cowardice of Van Gaal. When they return to Premier League action, they’ll still have the injuries for a while yet at least. If he continues to play so conservatively when the stakes aren’t as high, then the failure to win the league, perhaps even miss Champions League qualification this season, will be built on the same thing. It is time for a change of approach at the very least, and probably a chance of manager.

United fans can look across to the Etihad, where Manchester City made a relatively straightforward job of a potentially tricky group, and remember when they used to do that.