Simeone boils over but lives to fight another day
Munich. For seven years they could make no greater claim than that they were one of the best 16 teams in Europe. In all Wenger’s time in the Champions League, they reached one final, one other semi-final (2009) and four quarterfinals. Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool have all achieved far more in club football’s defining tournament.
This season, Arsenal have excelled in the next tier down, the Europa League, scoring a competition-high 29 times and winning eight games. It was Wenger’s misfortune to be chasing one last trophy against the best team left in the competition: the fierce collective of Atletico, with Griezmann leading the charge and Diego Costa on the bench. Too fierce, in fact. The lack of self-control from the second-best placed team in Spain and their bench in the opening moments was bizarre. Simeone, who took over at Atletico in 2011, has guided them to two Champions League finals (2014 and 2016) and won the 2012 Europa League.
Atletico are now perennial European heavyweights, as they are in La Liga. Arsenal can no longer make that claim.
Wenger used his programme notes to reminisce. “This will be my final European night at the Emirates. I don’t like to look back too much, I prefer to look forward, but there are some ties that stand out, notably qualifying against Real Madrid in 2006 and beating Barcelona here in 2011,” he wrote.
The gloom of the West Ham game at the weekend lifted, partly because Simeone gave the home fans a reason to get behind their team. The crowd can also start to imagine life beyond Wenger, without the ambivalence that has soured the past three years. If Liverpool’s supporters set the bar for passion against Roma, Arsenal’s took a step toward full engagement and away from sullenness, at least until Laurent Koscielny made a mess of a long ball to Griezmann and Shkodran Mustafi slipped.
Alexandre Lacazette’s earlier headed goal landed a belated blow on a side forced to play with 10 for 80 minutes. Only a world-class curmudgeon would not want to see Wenger go out with a European trophy in Lyon next month, after 22 years in which two defeats in finals have hardly put tinsel around his work. He deserves his moment – and his reckoning with Marseille.