Arsenal hold on to away draw against Besiktas

ISTANBUL: Arsenal on Tuesday survived the test of a raucous Istanbul crowd and a hugelyenergised Besiktas side to leave Turkey with a goalless draw and their hopes intact of advancing to the Champions League group stage.

In the first leg of the Champions League playoff, Arsenal failed to score the allimportant away goal but will be relieved to have escaped from Istanbul with a 0-0 scoreline and still every hope they will qualify in the home leg.

However, the only sour note was they ended the match with 10 men as key Welsh midfielder Aaron Ramsey was sent off 10 minutes from time. The prospect of entry into the lucrative group stages of the Champions League spurred on Besiktas, who came third in the Turkish league last season under Croatian manager Slaven Bilic.

Helped by the noisy, partisan home crowd, Besiktas caused the London side trouble from the start with new signing Demba Ba a potent threat. Everything was at stake for Arsenal who came into the game with a 100 per cent record in Champions League play-offs, having played 12 and won 12.

For manager Arsene Wenger, failing to make the lucrative group stage of Europe’s elite club competition for a 17th consecutive campaign would be nothing short of a disaster. Wenger had said he was tempted to field German World Cup-winning trio Mesut Ozil, Per Mertesacker and Lukas Podolski for the first time this season given the potential difficulty

of the tie but in the end opted to leave them out.

In other matches, Athletic Bilbao secured a vital away goal through Iker Muniain just before the break in Naples and go into the return leg next Wednesday at San Mames as slight favourites despite Gonzalo Higuain net ting a 68th-minute equaliser for Napoli in a 1-1 draw.

Stefan Kiessling, Karim Bellarabi and Heung-min Son were on target for Bayer Leverkusen side in Denmark as Roger Schmidt’s men earned a 3-2 victory away to FC Copenhagen