Mikel Arteta and his team landed in the Spanish capital under bright sunshine on Tuesday evening, but a storm is brewing. An extreme weather warning has been issued for the day of their Champions League semi-final first leg against Atletico Madrid, alongside the whirlwind that is their coach, Diego Simeone. A deluge is forecast.
Arteta shrugged off the impending weather. He is well-practised in that art by now, exuding positivity. Sometimes, that positivity can feel forced, but Arsenal are in the white heat of their season and cannot afford any more backward steps.
“We have to play with confidence, desire and will,” Arteta said. “We have to play with our energy flowing. Now is the moment to make a statement and show how good we are. The opportunity is in front of us and we have to take it.”
There was only one misstep, like a glitch in a video game. But Arteta is usually so smooth that it provoked comment afterwards. Early in his press conference at the Estadio Metropolitano, he was asked whether Riccardo Calafiori and Jurrien Timber, who have been injured, were available to play.
“Yeah, those two are available for tomorrow,” Arteta said. There was some surprise—happy surprise. Timber, in particular, has been badly missed. The conversation moved on a couple of questions, then the subject returned.
“Can I just double-check, you did say Jurrien is available tomorrow?” a journalist asked. Arteta grinned. “You spotted that well,” he said. The journalist noted that the news must be an incredible boost. “Jurrien is not in the squad,” Arteta clarified. “Richy and Bukayo, they are in the squad.”
It was a strange interlude. The subject was not mentioned again, and uncomplicated positivity returned. This, after all, is Arsenal’s second consecutive Champions League semi-final. Atletico may well be the weakest side left in the competition, presenting a huge opportunity for Arsenal.
“It’s a massive privilege to be here again, two years in a row in the semi-final of the Champions League,” Arteta said. “Yeah, what an opportunity and we’re going to grab it with both hands. We’re going to see a team that wants to be dominant, that wants to win it, and that wants to start to decide the tie tomorrow.”
Arteta and his players have reached a point in the season where they can feel the pull of history. This is the stadium where Liverpool beat Spurs in the Champions League final in 2019, and the prospect of Arsenal adding their name to the list of English clubs who have won it is now becoming real.
Their Champions League campaign has flown under the radar. There is an obsession around Arsenal’s season, but it has nothing to do with the Champions League. There is a fixation with their attempt to win the Premier League for the first time in 22 years, and with their propensity to finish as runners-up, which has been their fate for the last three years.
More particularly, their attempt to hold off Manchester City at the top of the table has been packaged in the public mind as a test of nerve. It is, many have contended, a battle against themselves, a challenge of their inner strength, as much as it is a struggle against Pep Guardiola’s serial winners.
The fact that Arsenal are now three games away from winning the Champions League is almost an afterthought. It has come up on the blindside. All the focus has been on their attempt to get over the line at home, and yet, suddenly, they are close to having a shot at the biggest club trophy of all.
There is an argument that winning the Champions League would be more significant to Arsenal than winning the Premier League. For a start, Arsenal have never won it, neither when it was in its guise as the European Cup nor in its more recent incarnation. Manchester United, Liverpool, Nottingham Forest, Aston Villa, Chelsea, and Manchester City have all won it, but Arsenal, the most august of all clubs, have only ever reached the final once, losing to Barcelona in Paris in 2006.
There is an expectation that the winner of the competition will come from the other semi-final between Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich, but if Arsenal make it to Budapest at the end of next month to face one of them in the final, they know that anything can happen in a one-off match.
Atletico are still a formidable team in some ways. They still have wonderful players of the calibre of Antoine Griezmann and Julian Alvarez, but they are not the obdurate, bloody-minded side of old. In the Champions League group phase, Atletico conceded the most goals of any team that finished in the top 16: 15 in eight games. In domestic matches, they have conceded three or more goals on nine occasions in all competitions, including against relegation strugglers Elche last week.
Arteta was asked again about the approaching storm. “We adapt to any context,” he said. “And for the last nine months, imagine the amount of games we have played, given that we have played in different scenarios, different contexts, with different opponents. So we adapt to the conditions in the best possible way to be ourselves and win the game.”
