Arsenal led and trailed before leaving Lisbon with a perfectly acceptable draw from the first leg of their Europa League clash with Sporting.
It gets bad press in this country, but the Europa really does provide pretty consistently decent entertainment.
Specifically in the case of this enormously fun Europa League last-16 game between Sporting and Arsenal, decent entertainment that is entirely at odds with the absolute shitshow that was last night’s Champions League last-16 game between Spurs and Milan.
Both these teams appear worlds apart from those drab and dreadful teams, but of course, neither Arsenal nor Sporting can really grumble about it because both have only themselves to blame for being here rather than there. Spurs were only in the Champions League because Arsenal collapsed last season, and Spurs were only in the last 16 as group winners because Sporting shat that particular bed in a grand manner.
This game was tremendous fun, though, and it ends with the tie very much alive albeit tilted in Arsenal’s favour thanks to a fortuitous equaliser that involved a massive deflection and could on another day have been lost to VAR due to a foul in the build-up.
A draw felt like the right result for a game in which both teams attacked with verve and menace, Arsenal predictably offering their own aggressive response to the idea that the scrapping of the away-goals rule has made visiting teams more cautious.
But what made the game truly entertaining was that this attacking intent was combined with defending that wasn’t bad exactly, but was a bit seat-of-the-pants. A lot of it felt chaotic and a great deal of it was distinctly last-ditch.
Both teams will be aggrieved at the nature of the opening goals they conceded. Both came from set-pieces where defenders went AWOL and all evening Arsenal were playing with a significant handicap of an uncertain goalkeeper short of match practice in Matt Turner. His uncertainty appeared to leak into the players in front of him, and never more obviously than in a Sporting equaliser where a corner led to a free header with Turner starting to come, inexplicably changing his mind and leaving a bamboozled Jakub Kawior ducking underneath the ball as it came across goal.
Having trailed Sporting led early in the second half before Arsenal levelled again. Which is very Arsenal at the moment.
They are in general not quite as good as they were early in the season. That’s not really a criticism, because earlier in the…
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