After guiding us to successive Champions League semi-finals, Mikel Arteta feels that it may take some time to really realise what our squad have achieved.
Only three years ago, we were celebrating our return to Europe’s premier club competition after six seasons away, and after a quarter-final finish on our first attempt, we have now reached the final four in the two seasons since.
A goalless draw against Sporting CP in N5, coupled with the 1-0 success in Lisbon, has seen us reach the Champions League semi-finals for just the fourth time in our history, and, having achieved half of those in the past 12 months, Mikel is delighted with the progress his team continues to show.
Now he can’t wait to try and plot a path past Atletico Madrid and take another step forward to finally clinching club football’s ultimate prize for the first time in our history.
“It’s a great night, I’m so proud of everybody at the club,” he reflected. “Thank you to our supporters for the manner in which they followed the team. It’s the first time we’ve (reached the semi-finals consecutively) in 140 years, so that tells you the difficulty and magnitude of what we’ve done.
“I think we don’t realise it now, but we’ll realise it in a few years, so don’t take for granted what we’ve done. It’s extremely difficult to achieve, and it’s never been achieved (by ourselves), so big gratitude to our players and everyone who’s contributed to achieving that.
“We’re not perfect, we want to improve in every area, but we have two magical nights to play against Atletico and we’re certainly going to prepare well for that.
“We’ll take things from (October’s meeting) and games they have played recently, but we’re going to have to go to Madrid, be ourselves, and compete in the manner we have – and then we’ll have a big chance to win it.”
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Just like in the first leg, we had relied on a solid defensive display to get the job done, and having prevented the two-time Portuguese champions from scoring in 180 minutes of action, we’ve now kept eight Champions League clean sheets this term despite coming up against some of the continent’s best clubs.
Mikel admits that we will need to step things up against Atletico if we want to progress to the final in Budapest, but our defensive solidity is something that he hopes we can continue to hang our hat on if needed between now and then.
Reflecting on the goalless draw, he said: “It’s the Champions League – the margins are very small, and when we had the dominance and situations to kill the tie, we didn’t. It was always going to be open but it was very controlled – especially in the second half – we didn’t allow any shots for the opposition apart from the last long throw, so it was very solid.
“We need to improve in certain areas, that’s for sure, and we need some players back in order to do that as well, but overall it was a great night.”
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