Key events
David Hytner
Martin Ødegaard has accepted that Arsenal will remain open to criticism until they shed their nearly-men reputation and is confident the club are primed to do precisely that this season.
The captain cut a convincing figure on the eve of Wednesday night’s Champions League semi-final first leg at Atlético Madrid, insisting he and his teammates were ready to respond to the lessons of the past and deliver silverware.
Ødegaard was referring to the Champions League semi-final exit against Paris Saint-Germain last season but he might also have been thinking about the Premier League runners-up finishes in each of the previous three years. Arsenal are top of the table and chasing a first league title since 2004.
“It’s always going to be there until we win and that’s something you have to live with,” Ødegaard said. “We need to take all our experiences and the lessons and use them in a good way. It’s part of football and part of the journey.
Atletico are renowned as a tight, pragmatic side, but their identity has changed a little in the last few years. Their 14 Champions League games this season have produced a whopping 60 goals.
Arsenal’s games have been a lot tighter, particularly at their end. In 12 games they’ve scored 27 and conceded only 5.
The players on a yellow card
Nobody. Yellow cards are wiped going into the semi-finals.
Sid Lowe
At the beginning of the final training session before their biggest game in a decade, Atlético Madrid’s players lined up by the centre circle at the Metropolitano and waited for their coach to come. Diego Simeone arrived and ran through the middle of them, from Juan Musso and Jan Oblak at one end to Antoine Griezmann and Ademola Lookman at the other. As he passed, head down, they cheered and hit him – if not quite as hard as they do when it’s a player’s turn. Gauntlet run, applause echoed round the empty stadium. Happy birthday, mister.
Simeone turned 56 on Tuesday. He has spent almost 20 of those here: first as the captain who won the double, then the coach who lifted Atlético’s next league title, 18 years on, and now leads them into his fourth and their seventh European Cup semi-final, nine years since the last. What do you get the man who has it all? “Buah! You can’t imagine how good it is to be in the four best teams in Europe,” he said after the quarter-final; “I have no birthday wish,” he said before this semi-final, “just pure gratitude to be able to be with my three sons on my birthday, with my two daughters, my mum, my wife, my lifelong friends.”
One of the sons was hidden in the crowd somewhere, hitting him. The day that Simeone bade farewell to the Vicente Calderón as a player in December 2004, he carried his youngest son, two-year-old Giuliano, in his arms. The days before he came back to Madrid as coach in December 2011, he stopped in a cafe in Mar del Plata and, over a croissant and a glass of milk, asked Giuliano, then eight, what he thought. “You’re going to coach [Radamel] Falcao?!” the kid replied, excitement giving way to reality. “But … if it goes well, you won’t come back.”
David Hytner
It was the night when Arsenal made their first big statement of the season in the Champions League, when they advertised their desire to go all the way in Europe’s most glamorous competition; to create club history. They had welcomed Atlético Madrid in the third round of league phase matches and it turned into a showcase for all of the best bits about Mikel Arteta’s team.
The bolted-door defence. The furious counterpress. The physicality. The speed and ruthlessness. The set-piece productivity. And, linked to everything but trumping the lot, the total self-belief. Arsenal were unable to find a way through in the first half or the early part of the second – it was tight – but they did not panic because they knew the goal would come. It was inevitable. They were inevitable.
When Gabriel Magalhães scored it in the 57th minute, it was the prompt for a devastating salvo, Arsenal raining in three more by the 70th minute. The game finished 4-0, Atlético departing battered and bruised. It was late October and the performance and result were very much of a piece with the Arsenal of the first half of the season.
Team news
Mikel Arteta makes two changes, both in attack, from the nervy Premier League victory over Newcastle on Saturday. Gabriel Martinelli and Viktor Gyokeres, who scored three of the four goals when Arsenal trounced Atletico earlier this season, replace Eberechi Eze and the injured Kai Havertz. It’s the MGM attack – Madueke, Gyokeres, Martinelli – so we’re contractually obliged to link to a lion roaring.
Bukayo Saka isn’t yet to fit to play a full 90 minutes; Riccardo Calafiori joins him on a strong Arsenal bench.
Atletico make four changes from their 3-2 win over Athletic Bilbao at the weekend. Julian Alvarez, David Hancko, Johnny Cardoso and Ademola Lookman come in for Clement Lenglet, Pablo Barrios, Alex Baena and Alexander Sorloth.
Atletico Madrid (4-4-2) Oblak; Llorente, Pubill, Hancko, Ruggeri; Simeone, Cardoso, Koke, Lookman; Griezmann, Alvarez.
Subs: Musso, Esquivel, Sorloth, Mendoza, Baena, Almada, Lenglet, Molina, Vargas, Le Normand, Bonar, Julio Diaz.
Arsenal (4-3-3) Raya; White, Saliba, Gabriel, Hincapie; Odegaard, Zubimendi, Rice; Madueke, Gyokeres, Martinelli.
Subs: Arrizabalaga, Setford, Mosquera, Saka, Jesus, Eze, Norgaard, Trossard, Calafiori, Lewis-Skelly, Dowman, Salmon.
Referee Danny Makkelie (Netherlands)
This is the fourth meeting between Atletico and Arsenal. The first two came in the Europa League semi-final of 2017-18, when goals from Antoine Griezmann and Diego Costa put Atleti through 2-1 on aggregate. The other was in the league phase of this season’s competition, when Arsenal ran riot in the second half.
Preamble
History is made! Or rather, it will be at 8pm BST tonight, when Mikel Arteta’s oft-maligned Arsenal play back-to-back Champions League semi-finals for the first time in the club’s history. It’ll count for little if they don’t win either the Premier League or Champions League this season, but it’s an undeniable marker of their progression from the 15th-best team in England to one Europe’s finest.
For the second year in a row, Arsenal’s semi-final involves arguably the two best teams never to win the European Cup or Champions League. Paris Saint-Germain’s glorious triumph last season left a vacancy for Atletico, though they would argue they were already in the top two. After all, no side has played in more Champions League finals without winning the thing. On all three occasions, in 1974, 2014 and 2016, Atleti came agonisingly close.
Either they or Arsenal, who lost their only final to Barcelona 20 years ago, will get another crack in Budapest on 30 May. It should be a fascinating struggle between two teams best known for their defensive excellence. We’ll have none of that nine-goal nonsense tonight.
Kick off 8pm BST.
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