After I argued a couple of weeks ago that Manchester City and Arsenal stood a good chance of progressing in the Champions League, they both lost the opening legs of their last 16 ties, convincingly, to leave themselves in weak positions that they probably won’t recover from.
City’s game was over before halftime. Lionel Messi, Neymar and, in particular, Luis Suarez, pulled its defence around like a sock-puppet that had broken free of its owner. Vincent Kompany and Martin Demichelis were left hopelessly fumbling around in the dark, while Barcelona’s luminous front three entertained the audience with nutmegs and high-quality goals.
City’s second-half reply in the form of a Sergio Aguero goal and a Joe Hart penalty save was enough to keep the tie alive at 2-1. But with a second leg away at Camp Nou to come it is, let’s say, metaphorically as well as literally on its last leg.
Tuesday programming alert: Watch AS Monaco vs Arsenal on the four main Sportsnet channels and Atletico Madrid vs Bayer Leverkusen on Sportsnet World. Coverage starts at 3:30 pm ET. || Sportsnet World NOW || Broadcast schedule
Arsenal was embarrassed in a slightly different way. Not by opponents capable of proactive humiliation, but by its own failure to judge the occasion in which it found itself. Monaco’s success was in waiting for a Wenger-ised Arsenal team to demonstrate just the right amount of naivety and then picking it off, the trick made all the more painful to watch because it’s been done so often before, and this time lacked even a better-class of opponent to excuse it. Wenger needs three goals away in Monaco to go through, which is more than Leonardo Jardim’s team has conceded in the tournament so far.
And yet if you were to take away the idea that Arsenal’s situation was an equivalent situation to City’s, simply because of the shared disappointment and their bleak prospects of progress, you’d be missing a strong point of divergence. Namely: the contexts in which their likely exits will exist.
For Arsenal, this isn’t the end of the world, because it is the one negative in a second-half of the season full of tantalizing glimpses at progress. The Monaco defeat came in the middle of a run of 14 wins in 17 games since Christmas, where Arsenal’s best players have finally turned up and given a good hint that sometime soon they will be more of a force than they are right now. Wenger can look forward to an FA Cup semifinal, a run at catching City in the league and a next season where, potentially, only slight adjustments could bring proper title contention for the first time in 10 years.
Manuel Pellegrini has all of that stuff, but in reverse. His team was put out of the FA Cup by Middlesbrough, is now only one point ahead of Arsenal in the league and faces the not-exactly-enticing idea of rebuilding a squad that has grown old together without ever doing it in Europe. Progress in the Champions League was supposed to be what this season was about for City; now that hasn’t happened, there’s only really regression to focus on.
It leaves this week’s matches—and probable joint European exits—looking quite different, just one layer beneath the surface.
City goes into a game away to an in-form Barcelona knowing that it represents a last, slim chance to redirect its season into something positive; knowing also that a win may be the only way the manager keeps his job. It has to score twice against one of the best teams in Europe, without letting Messi, Suarez or Neymar score even once and yet the pressure to beat the same team that emasculated it just weeks ago is huge.
Wednesday programming alert: Watch Barcelona vs Manchester City on the four main Sportsnet channels and Borussia Dortmund vs Juventus on Sportsnet World. Coverage starts at 3:30 pm ET. || Sportsnet World NOW || Broadcast schedule
There’s no such pressure on Arsenal. Its upbeat spin outside of Europe meant that the moment it conceded a third goal at home to Monaco it essentially freed itself from the self-imposed expectation that it would get through in the tie and thus created a second leg that, in some ways, offers a weird kind of break from the season of neurosis it has endured.
The specific problem of being Arsenal right now is knowing that you’re at last good enough to win (as I mentioned in my piece backing it to beat Monaco), but (as the first game against Monaco ended up showing) you’re simultaneously struggling to utilize your resources to full effect, because you aren’t yet sure of how best to organize them. A game where only a three-goal win will do takes away all of the minor dilemmas—“Welbeck or Walcott?” and so on—and replaces them with a moment of clarity: Arsenal has to attack, and that’s it.
Context means that while Arsenal has light relief and the ability to lose and not be devastated, City has the angst of high pressure built on surely unrealistic expectations. They’ll both probably go down, but the thing is, it’ll be under very different circumstances.
Either way, after what happened last time, I won’t be making any predictions.
Ethan Dean-Richards is a London-based writer. Follow him on Twitter