“Late one last night, was it?”

“You could say that”

The words this morning from the Management when she got up this morning; I’d come crashing through the door at after 12am and slunk straight in to bed. It was flipping worth it though. My, wasn’t it worth it, eh?

Arsenal are in to the quarter finals of the Champions League for the first time since 2010. That’s 14 years it’s been since we hit that milestone, having exited the competition at the round of 16 for our previous seven times we’ve played in it. It’s funny because I’ve never even really registered that in my mind until others had pointed it out, but when you look at our opponents each time – usually peak Barca or Bayern, you can kind of see why we went out so many times. But I didn’t realise it was a ‘thing’, so to get that out of the system by beating Porto on penalties as we did last night, wow, that’s a good feeling that I didn’t know I had.

I guess the best place to start is the end, because winning on penalties is both the best and worst feeling in the world in the space of about 15 minutes. When the whistle went I was convinced that we were getting shafted; Porto had niggled, dived, feigned injury, scored a last-gasp sucker-punch in the Dragao, fallen to their knees at every opportunity and benefitted from two of the weakest refereeing performances you’re going to get in the Champions League. After 15 minutes of timewasting they had realised the referee was going to let them get away with it all night and it empowered them to continue their sh*thousery for the rest of the tie. Which last 30 minutes and penalties longer than we’d have all wanted it too.

But step forward David Raya. In shootouts the winners are only ever the ‘keepers. The attackers are expected to score and if they miss then it’s a poor penalty. So it’s all on the keeper to make himself a hero and last night there was definitely a winner in our Spanish ‘keeper. One of the challenges Raya has had is that he looked shaky when he started at us, we had a beloved ‘keeper in Aaron Ramsdale and on top of that, because we haven’t really given up many chances at all to teams this season because our defence has been excellent, he’s had loads of games in which he’s had nothing to do. He hasn’t really had his ‘Ramsdale at Leicester save’ moment, or ‘Ramsdale saves the points for Arsenal at Liverpool’ like Aaron did last season. He’s just plucked balls out of the air from crosses and adopted that left half space position in our defence when we’re building from the back. But yesterday even felt like it could be his seminal moment. All eyes were on him, the hopes of Arsenal players, staff and fans were resting on his shoulders and he had to make good saves to ultimately put us through. And to be fair to him, he absolutely did. His two penalty saves put us through and the Arsenal fans went in to raptures. Bring on the next round!

But to get to that point we still had to overcome the one goal deficit cruelly knocked in at the death a few weeks back. The game kicked off with a side that you’d expect, with Arsenal playing practically the same side at the weekend with the exception of Ramsdale for Raya, who couldn’t play against Brentford. And it started in a similar fashion to the one in Portugal; we controlled the ball in the most part, but Porto were organised and made life difficult for us. You can tell this Porto team is well drilled and this was never going to be a cricket score, but a combination of the referee deciding that he was going to not blow up for anything (which empowered Porto to waste more time as I mentioned above), as well as the ball being stopped at every opportunity, made this a very ‘bitty’ game. We just seemed a little edgy and maybe the players were a little too adrenaline fuelled or something, because there were a few Saliba headers that he kind of got semi-wrong (i.e. they flew off his head at side angles, or he didn’t quite get the 100% contact he normally does), as well as few of the longer passes from the likes of Gabriel, just seemed to go awry or be over-hit. Maybe it was a combination of nerves as well as adrenaline, but this wasn’t the kind of fluid Arsenal that we’ve been used to seeing and I think that played out for most of the match if I’m honest.

But we did get that all-important goal in that first half and I have to say, Martin Odegaard, take a bow son. Trossard’s finish was precise and great in to the corner, but the way that Odegaard weighted and threaded his pass to the Belgian was absolutely elite. This kid is a master in the final thirds and yesterday I think he was our best player, despite Raya obviously getting the plaudits and man of the match trophy for his fine saves. But Odegaard led the press almost all the time, he was dropping back to pick up from Raya, he stepped up and put away our first penalty in the shootout, he was magnificent. It was a true captain’s performance and we saw the absolute best from Odegaard yesterday. I loved it.

The game itself in that second half kind of fell in to a bit of a stoppage-infused match of nothingness thereafter. As we got in to the last 20 minutes we started to look leggy – understandable given the fact we played Saturday-Tuesday with practically the same team and whilst I’m not going to go big on criticising the manager or anyone to do with The Arsenal this morning, I did think that Arteta could have made more subs a little earlier, because you could see that we looked jaded. But on an evening when you are under pressure, you are up against an anti-football team, you have a few players who were feeling the burn a little bit, you really just need to think about getting the result and that’s pretty much it.

So we move on, we are in the hat for the next round, which is where it gets serious as the big names will be coming to the Emirates. Whoever we play, it will most likely be a former bogey team, so there’s something in there about breaking down another psychological barrier that I kind of fancy.

One final couple of bits from me before I clock off; screw that absolute muppet of a Porto manager. He had the cigar out after the first leg, dancing around and making comments like “they came to play football, we came to win”. Well lad, we came to do both last night. And we did. Justice was served so get back in your box. Secondly, a quick shout out to the atmosphere and the noise of the home fans – we were at it from start to finish last night and we delivered the goods.

Onwards and upwards! We now have a few week’s of Arsenal-less football so it’s good to end on such a high. James will most likely do a post-match review during this week on the Same Old Arsenal pod so you keep your eyes peeled for that one.

Catch you all tomorrow!