Devastated Gunners Pressure on Arteta as Arsenal crash out
Season over. Arsenal are out of the Europa League and there will be no redemption in this wretched campaign. No trophy and, for a fifth consecutive season, no Champions League football. They are falling further and further behind.
It was a deserved exit, despite twice striking the frame of the goal. Villarreal were the better side over both legs of this semi-final and there will be deserved criticism for Arsenal and Mikel Arteta, their underpressure manager, who yet again unsuccessfully tinkered with his line-up. He looked callow, stressed, angry, haunted. Like his team, he looked lost.
“We are devastated,” Arteta said, before embarking on some deluded revisionism. “I think we deserved to win the game but the details define these ties. We had three big chances, they didn’t have anything but they are through. So many things happened to us, and so many players were just trying to compete not at their best.”
Arteta even claimed an injury in the warm-up to Granit Xhaka “changed our plan completely”. Xhaka was slated to play left-back but Kieran Tierney had to be rushed back. Arteta was questioned about his future and his answers were tellingly clipped. “It is not about talking, it is about showing,” he said. He needs to start doing so.
Freddie Ljungberg, who was in caretaker charge before Arteta took over, said he hoped this was “rock bottom” and called for a “change in how they invest into the club”. The attention will also focus on the Kroenke ownership.
There were protests before and more after the match, as fans blocked the roads outside the Emirates, and the dissent is likely to grow.
Arsenal just could not score and had little of the drive, desire or determination that it takes to get over the finishing line. They are a team who have something fundamentally wrong with them, suffering from a kind of rot that has to be cut out before it infects some of their promising young players such as Emile Rowe Smith, who looked utterly distraught at the end.
Arsenal may start next season out of European competition for the first time since 1996, while even getting this far has been wholly unconvincing. They stumbled into the semi-finals. Maybe they will scrape into the grim new Europa Conference League.
It was a good evening for Unai Emery, Arteta’s predecessor, who returned to the Emirates 18 months after he was sacked and led Villarreal to the final – incredibly, their first major final of any kind – against Manchester United on May 26 in Gdansk. Remarkably, it is the fifth Europa League final in eight years for Emery, having won the trophy three times in a row with Sevilla. Maybe he was not the problem.
This was it for Arsenal. Win or bust. Instead they were torpedoed by the “Yellow Submarine” of Villarreal, who attacked, were positive and, led by the immense Raul Albiol at centre-half, put their bodies on the line when they had to.
They looked like they just wanted it more and that was the greatest indictment of a pitiful Arsenal. The Spanish side also suffered problems with players missing and the loss of the dangerous Samuel Chukwueze to a first-half injury.
Yes, Pierre-emerick Aubameyang hit the post twice, but they were isolated incidents. For the first, the ball flew back and forth in the Villarreal area before falling to Aubameyang, who struck a controlled volley back across goal that beat goalkeeper Geronimo Rulli before clipping the outside of the far post.
Then, into the second half, he rose between two defenders to meet Hector Bellerin’s cross and the ball hit the inside of a post. Albiol hooked it clear before it could cross the line.
Strangely, it was the Arsenal captain’s last involvement as he was then substituted, Arteta continuing to make some curious decisions. In the first leg in Spain he played with a “false nine”. It did not work. Here he paired Smith Rowe and Martin Odegaard in front of Thomas Partey – who had an awful game and looks a shadow of the player he was at Atletico Madrid – in midfield and that did not work either.
There was more purpose and a bit more panic at the start of the second half. The ball broke to Nicolas Pepe and he struck a powerful cross-shot that bounced wide, as Emery sprinted along his technical area to cajole his team. Villarreal were fortunate again, though, when Bellerin’s cross was fingertipped by Rulli straight to Smith Rowe, who took a touch and chipped the ball through a thicket of players towards the empty net, only for it to drift wide.
But Villarreal also threatened and regained the initiative. Partey again lost possession and Paco Alcacer spurned the chance to run at Bernd Leno, instead teeing up Gerard Moreno, whose effort was tame.
A header from Rob Holding flew across goal for Arsenal but that was
it. They threw players forward but no one accepted responsibility.
At the final whistle, it was Francis Coquelin, the former Arsenal midfielder, who had the ball. Like Emery, he had come back to haunt his old club. “Good evening,” Emery said, before proclaiming how proud he was. It was probably his best night at Arsenal.
Arsenal (4-1-4-1) Leno 5; Bellerin 6 (Nketiah 90+1), Holding 6, Mari 5, Tierney 6 (Willian 80); Partey 4; Saka 6, Odegaard 6 (Martinelli 66), Smith Rowe 6, Pepe 5; Aubameyang 7 (Lacazette 80).
Subs Ryan (g), Okonkwo (g), Gabriel, Cedric, Chambers, Nelson, Elneny. Booked Nketiah.
Villarreal (4-4-2) Rulli 5; Gaspar 6, Albiol 8, Torres 7, Pedraza 6 (Moreno 90+1); Chukwueze 6 (Pino 30, Gomez 90+1), Parejo 7, Coquelin 7, Trigueros 7; Moreno 7, Alcacer 7 (Bacca 72).
Subs Asjeno (g), Funes Mori, Raba, Estupinan, Pena, Costa, Baena, Nino. Booked Pino.
Referee Slavko Vincic (Slovenia).