It is spring in European football’s greatest competition and as usual at the Emirates Stadium they are pulling down the shutters on Champions League football for another year - lights out, doors closed, dissent murmured and see you again next season for more of the same.
But can
it really be the same next year? The seventh successive round of 16 exit was painful and humiliating for Arsene Wenger in a new way, a ten-man team still attacking in suicidal fashion en route to conceding ten goals over two legs against one of the modern game’s most indomitable sides - in front of an Emirates that was emptying at a rate.
It felt like a mini-apocalypse even in this the, troubled times of late Wenger, days when the support turn upon each other as they did again on this occasion and all anyone can agree upon is that it has to change. There was a dreadful symmetry to the two 5-1 defeats away and at home and something of the schoolboy-team thrashing about the way Douglas Costa and then Arturo Vidal added three goals between them in the last 12 minutes.
Wenger’s team were caught between attacking in search of goals they knew could not score and defending against a team they knew they could not stop. Yet watching hollow-eyed from the bench, the Arsenal manager had already made up his mind who was to blame and it may not surprise you to hear this was not the fault of anyone connected to Arsenal. The Greek referee’s decision to send off Laurent Koscielny was, Wenger said “unexplainable” and “scandalous” and his team were “in great shape”.
Arguing with Wenger in these circumstances is futile because already he has reordered history to suit his hypothesis: a team fighting against impossible odds dealt a monstrous injustice, and damn all those in the room who point reluctantly to an established pattern of failure. On the Clock End they briefly sang for majority owner Stan Kroenke to “get out of our club” and those who had them waved the “Wenger Out” placards, always carried to be deployed in an emergency.
On the bench it looked like Alexis Sanchez, withdrawn in the second half, might have been disguising a laugh although at what or who it was not clear. Yet he will know that at this delicate point in his relationship with the club every public act is to be subject to scrutiny and one gets the impression that he does nothing without a reason.