Are Arsenal Players Weak Because Of Arsene Wenger?

So proficient in the pyrotechnics of tiki-taka did Arsenal become that Barcelona began to regard it as something of a feeder club. Over the course of the past 18 years, the Spanish superpower spent almost $200 million on eight of Wenger’s players, including two of his captains: Thierry Henry and Cesc Fabregas.

“They play in a style that most emulates what we do at Barcelona,” said no less an authority than Andres Iniesta.

Unfortunately, as Arsenal supporters were brutally reminded over the course of two logic-shredding, history-making days, the comparison ends there. It’s one thing to play like Barcelona, quite another to possess the iron will of the perennial La Liga giants.

On the face of it, the prospects for both teams were equally bleak going into the home leg of their Champions League round-of-16 matches against Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain respectively. Their managers, the hopelessly beleaguered Wenger and the wearily defiant Luis Enrique, were under the kind of relentless pressure that gave their faces a perma-grey pallor. Indeed, the Catalan recently announced he needed a “rest”, Pep style, and would leave Barcelona at the end of the La Liga season. Meanwhile, the Frenchman, who has yet to decide whether to sign a new two-year deal at the club he’s graced for the greater part of 21 seasons, is being implored by an increasingly ravenous section of the Emirates to take the same long walk as Enrique has.

Neither team was given more than a Leicester City of a chance to advance to the quarterfinals, a rare shortfall by Barca but an annual rite of self-immolation for Arsenal. These were destined to be largely pointless contests in which face-saving was the order of the day.

Hoping to restore some pride after losing four of their past six games, Arsenal failed to even salvage a respectable scoreline, although they may have committed an even worse sin. They gave their fans false hope once again, this time for 53 minutes, before collapsing into a metaphorical heap of dysfunction and despair.

By the final whistle, the chasm in quality and resilience between the English and German sides wasn’t even as close as the 10-2 aggregate score and you could hardly blame the Emirates faithless for abandoning their doomed cause with 10 minutes — and more embarrassment — still remaining. They had seen this horror movie more times than they cared to remember and no matter how many years have passed, they knew the ending wasn’t about to change.

Just 24 hours later at the Camp Nou, Barcelona were facing an uphill climb almost as steep as the stadium’s bank of seats — or so it appeared to every reasonable person on the planet, save those inside the stadium. Amid an unrelenting wall of sound, their fans brandished placards with the words “Yes, we can”, a rallying cry that stood in stark contrast to the mood of resignation that had hung over the Emirates. There, you wouldn’t have been surprised to see banners asking: “Why even bother?”

“If PSG can score four goals against us, we can score six,” Luis Enrique foretold before the return match. Therein lies the difference between a team that has an unshakable confidence in their ability to bend opponents to their skill and one that wilt like orchids under a remorseless desert sun.

The math of belief is revealing and unassailable. Barca have now advanced past the first knockout stage for 10 consecutive seasons and Arsenal have exited stage right in this round for seven years running.

Such is their unbridled faith in themselves that you almost wonder if Barca’s Holy Trinity of Lionel Messi, Luis Suarez and Neymar had gotten together three weeks ago in Paris and decided to come up with the mother of all Champions League challenges: what if we spotted PSG four goals going in the second leg? After all, these are players who routinely blow our minds with their audacious talent and are seemingly immune to the bludgeoning tension of the big stage.

That, of the three, only Neymar was at his extraterrestrial best against PSG hardly mattered. It was Barca’s uncommon mental fortitude as much as their ball wizardry that broke the French champions’ spirit. Barca would stretch credibility to the limit by scoring three times in an hour to close the aggregate gap to 4-3, but it was their astonishing grace under pressure that proved the difference.

When Edinson Cavani scored a vital away goal in the 62nd minute, it looked to be truly over for Barca, the end of their impossibly heroic comeback. It would be only natural if heads dropped, shoulders sagged and players vented their frustration in the finger-pointing manner that Alexis Sanchez did in Arsenal’s first-leg capitulation to Bayern in Munich.

But this was Barcelona, not Arsenal, and if no one else knew what was coming next, they sure as hell did. And just to make it all slightly more interesting, they would only give themselves seven minutes to put in the last three they needed to advance. It would take a foolhardy opponent to attempt to play taps on Barca’s Champions League quest before the last second had ticked off the clock. After Cavani’s goal, PSG celebrated as if they had survived the home team’s assault and that premature triumphant display will haunt them for years to come.

My mind went back to the day before when Laurent Koscielny was sent off in the 53rd minute for a foul on Robert Lewandowski in the box. Even before the Bayern striker converted the ensuing penalty to equalise at 1-1, you could see the Arsenal players visibly deflate with the knowledge they would have to conjure four more goals playing a man down while holding Bayern scoreless. In that moment, it must have dawned on them that they were woefully unequipped both psychologically and tactically to prevent their fragile confidence from going to pieces, and they were entirely correct.

It was all so depressingly familiar and I, for one, couldn’t watch it unfold for a second time in three weeks. So I switched off the TV and hooked myself up to an IV of Stella Artois to numb the pain. I wasn’t even angry so much as sad. Sad not just for myself, but for Gooners everywhere, including my late father who took me to my first Arsenal game in 1982 when we stood in the North Bank at Highbury singing and chanting, unencumbered by the weight of expectation.

Wenger may be, as he said recently, “a specialist in masochism” but, contrary to popular belief, misery is the preferred state of most Gooners. I remember the early years of Wenger’s reign when “Oles” rang out around the ground as the likes of Thierry Henry, Dennis Bergkamp and Robert Pires passed the ball with gleeful abandon as their opponents gawped and chased helplessly.

There is little joy at the Emirates these days, but thankfully, there is an abundance of it at the Camp Nou, our other family cathedral of football at which my dad and I genuflected in the ’80s and ’90s on our frequent trips to Barcelona, where his business was located. And so when Barca completed their second mind-bending comeback of the PSG game to score that astonishing seven-minute hat trick and capture the tie on aggregate 6-5, I let out a primal scream and lifted my face to the heavens. I knew that somewhere up there my father was smiling and singing “Ale Ale Ale Ale, Forca Barca Ale!”

I just hope he managed to miss the Arsenal game.