Arsenal vs PSV Eindhoven - Emirates Stadium, London - Wednesday 7th March 2007

After the somewhat disappointing first leg of this tie, I wrote:

"I don't doubt that Arsenal are quite capable of scoring twice against that PSV team - the bigger problem is that if we concede one, it spells big trouble indeed."

Well, that is exactly what happened, except that we only managed to score once, not twice, or even the three times that we would have needed to win the tie as it turned out.

A defensive PSV team knew exactly what they needed to do to go through, and they were good enough at defending to accomplish it. They of course needed to sit back, defend in great depth, frustrate Arsenal, stop us from scoring too early, and they were always then going to give themselves a great chance of going through. As Arsenal got one goal, and started to go forward more and more desperately in search of a second, the number one priority was of course not to concede.

But, from their one attack of the game, about 8 minutes from the end, PSV snatched a goal, and thereby ended the contest. Exactly what one could see coming from a mile away ("one" seemingly being everybody except for the Arsenal players and coaching staff), but no less irritating for it. So, we are out of Europe prematurely in my view, but the most depressing thing of all was the sheer predictability of it all - you could see it coming all evening.

The reports of course gleefully highlighted the "meltdown" in Arsenal's season in the last 10 days or so - losing the Carling Cup final, going out of the FA Cup, and now out of Europe too - but for me, the seeds of all of this were sown at the away leg in Eindhoven - just before that run of games started. We had enough chances in that game to have won the tie by half time, a good half a dozen great chances in fact. We failed to take them, and PSV came out for the second half with much more confidence as a result. They scored, then played a very clever game for the rest of the tie to complete the victory.

Our inability or flat refusal to take our chances has defined much of this season for me - definitely a big area where improvement is needed. Whilst "concentrating on the league" for the rest of the season, let's hope we can start to fix it in time for next season's competition.