Arsenal suffer on another bleak night for Europe’s most bafflingly ineffective league

Arsenal’s 3-2 defeat to Olympiakos and Chelsea’s loss against Porto makes it five defeats out of six so far for Premier League teams this season


Ah, yes. The Premier League. Come in. Take a seat. Let’s have a look at these figures then. First up: £1bn spent on transfers in the calendar year. And against that, as of matchday two in the Champions League, a record of played six, lost five against the rest of Europe.

Not that Arsenal and Chelsea, both of whom were restrained in the transfer window, can be singled out on the Premier League’s huge-collective-spend-versus-Uefa-coefficient-down-the-plughole scale. On a night when the champions and the team with most points in the calendar year were both well beaten, it was instead hard not to reflect on the sheer oddity of a league where the art of team building appears to have been lost in a blizzard of acquisitiveness, unexpected stasis and frenetically muscular island nation football. And where somehow for all the millions spent, the Premier League continues to offer up to Europe’s elite club competition such obvious, startling weaknesses.

Mocked by Germany, fleeced in France, this seems to be the role currently of the world’s most outrageously gaudy league. There is a famous Mitchell and Webb sketch where a pair of haughty young SS soldiers look down at their menacing uniforms, the skulls on their badges, and wonder, all things considered, if they may actually be the bad guys after all.

Swaggering in through the door, jewellery clanking, solid gold hat in place, the Premier League appears to be here right now to perform a similar function, the dopey old bad guys here to make other teams feel better, and to provide moments of hubris and underdog joy such as that experienced by Olympiakos on Tuesday night.

The final whistle at the Emirates brought an agreeable kind of bedlam as players ran across to the travelling support and club officials embraced on the pitch, this huge, stunning glass-and-steel arena reduced, with painful poignance, to a rattly, high-spec shell. At the very least we can console ourselves with one thing. The Europa League, could, if England’s finest can pick up a few points somewhere, be about to become the best, most exciting Europa League in the world

By the end of a slightly frantic 3-2 home defeat there was almost something comforting in the sight of such well-worn, familiar, top-down failings in an Arsenal team who are now probably heading out at the earliest stage.

Two weeks and two eminently winnable games into their Champions League campaign, Arsenal are now running on the reserve tank in Group F after this home defeat, which mirrored in so many ways their last Champions League home defeat, to Monaco.

Before kick-off the steeply banked sides of the Emirates were abuzz with the usual mild sense of expectation, lifted by the boisterousness of the away support in their seething corner at the Clock end. From the start, Arsenal’s lack of thrust was noticeable. This can at times look like a lovely collection of parts that seems content too often to sit back and admire distantly its supple movements, its advanced electronic parts.

Mainly, though, this was an Arsenal team that seemed to think it simply had to turn up to win this game, a peculiar air of unearned arrogance that, as against Monaco, quickly turned to anxiety. It was fed by the team selection. Resting players in Zagreb in the first match in this group had left Arsenal horribly open in midfield. Resting Petr Cech here made absolutely no sense at all. It was a game-changer, too, as Cech, Arsenal’s sole summer signing, the man who would supposedly lift this team though his sheer presence, sat on the bench watching politely as his understudy, David Ospina, made a mistake that helped the game slip away at a vital stage.

Kostas Fortounis swung in the corner that put the visitors 2-1 up but Ospina was the chief mover here, palming Fortounis’s inswinging set-piece down and over his own goalline, a moment that it would be a dishonour to associate with Sunday league or park football.

Beyond that this was a strong Arsenal team, one that should have been good enough to win. It is question that seems to recur with baffling frequency, not least at home in this competition where they have now lost six of their past 13 matches. Why did Arsenal look so anxious, so tentative, so lacking in drive? One answer is simply that they lack drive, are tentative and easily become anxious.

Their only real point of thrust was in the interplay between Alexis Sánchez and Theo Walcott, who both made and scored one. Otherwise there simply seemed to be a lack of leadership on the field, embodied by the sublime, wonderfully talented Mesut Özil, a genuinely A-grade player who seems increasingly concerned with overcrafting every pass when what this team really needed was some drive and purpose and muscle from its classiest player. And beyond that some appalling defensive organisation, with vast tracts of space in front of the defence that helped game but limited opponents score three times.

Arsenal did belatedly begin to play with some constructive fury but as ever they were vulnerable on the counterattack, a weakness Francis Coquelin is often left to combat single-handedly, skittering about covering space like a man trying to fix a broken mains pipe and simultaneously replaster the scullery. Again Wenger took Coquelin off with his team behind. Again this left them soggier than ever in the middle. By the end here they were playing with an experimental triple strike force of Per Mertesacker, Joel Campbell and Theo Walcott, a moment of low comedy at the end of another bleak night for Europe’s most bafflingly ineffective league.

Louis van Gaal eyes ‘paradise’ but could yet extend Manchester United stay

Manager is due to retire in 2017 but says ‘You never know’ 
• Bastian Schweinsteiger says team spirit will fuel Champions League drive

There was a moment as Louis van Gaal held court with Bastian Schweinsteiger, contemplating what it would need to add another Champions League to their long and distinguished careers, when the Manchester United manager was informed of something that Sir Alex Ferguson had said about what it was like once you got “the bug” at Old Trafford.

Ferguson, described by the Daily Telegraph once as The Man Who Couldn’t Retire, had been discussing whether Van Gaal might find it equally as hard severing his ties when his contract expires at the end of next season. His conclusion was that Van Gaal might also decide to stay longer, on the basis that “once you get bitten, it is very difficult to walk away”.

The response from Van Gaal was certainly not a flat denial. “Normally I shall leave after next year but what is normal in our football world?” the Dutchman said. “You never know, so I cannot answer that question, but I did promise my wife to go with her to our paradise, so it shall be very hard for me to deny her that promise.

“I was 55 [when I first said I would retire] and then I went to Bayern Munich and next year I am 65. If I say I want to stay a year longer it shall be very hard for my wife.”

The place he calls paradise is his holiday home on the Algarve, where he and Truus plan to spend their retirement, and if Van Gaal goes through with those plans he is not leaving himself a great deal of opportunity – two seasons – to fulfil his ambition of winning the European Cup for a second time.

His team are top of the Premier League and United’s supporters can certainly be encouraged by Schweinsteiger’s response when the Germany international was asked what made him confident about the team’s chances of doing better in Europe than many people imagine.

Schweinsteiger’s explanation – “the team spirit” – was said in a way that made it feel as though there was a togetherness about the squad that he had seldom encountered at Bayern Munich. His body language and general demeanour provided the hard evidence why the World Cup winner reflected on his first few months in Manchester and said he felt “very comfortable” in his new surroundings.

Equally, it needs more than team spirit to reach a Champions League final and United’s defeat against PSV Eindhoven has left them under pressure to deliver a better performance when they play Wolfsburg, who currently lie fourth in the Bundesliga, on Wednesday. This is the first time United have gone into their second group game without a point since losing to Juventus in 1996 and Wolfsburg’s 5-1 defeat at Bayern last week was their first defeat in 15 matches.

Dieter Hecking has been voted the Bundesliga’s manager of the year after winning the German Cup last season, followed by beating Bayern on penalties to lift the German Super Cup. He is also clearly unafraid of speaking his mind, criticising the team’s Dutch striker Bas Dost recently for “egotism”, adding that the player who usually keeps Nicklas Bendtner out of the team “strolls around for three days as if somebody has taken his toy away”. Hecking later said it was a mistake to criticise his player publicly when the team’s success has been largely based on their togetherness.

They could potentially be tricky opponents, winning their first game against CSKA Moscow, but there is clearly a gulf between Bayern and the other Bundesliga teams – Pep Guardiola’s side have also inflicted a 6‑1 away win onWolfsburg in the last 18 months – whereas United have been showing signs of improvement and Ferguson’s verdict last week was that the collapsed transfer of the goalkeeper David de Gea to Real Madrid “might actually win us the league”.

Van Gaal also considered the domestic championship to be “realistic” and was typically modest when asked to expand on his reasons. “Because I did it everywhere” came the reply

His preparation for the Wolfsburg game has had to take into account an injury for Michael Carrick that means the midfielder will not be involved. Ander Herrera was also absent from United’s final training session and the same applied to Antonio Valencia, meaning the fit-again Phil Jones may get his first start of the season. Carrick’s problem was described as minor but Van Gaal is reluctant to risk him when he can play Schweinsteiger and Morgan Schneiderlin instead.

“We have made progress in the maturity of the team and the balance of the team,” the United manager said. “That is why I brought Schweinsteiger here and Schneiderlin because they give composure to the team.

“We have improved if we compare us with the team of last year, but we need still time to improve because we will have to improve to win the Premier League or a tournament like the Champions League. We are still improving and I can see that every week.”