One of my core attitudes is I prefer it when teams who approach the game in a brave way are rewarded by winning things. Long before I understood who Klopp the man was, this was what attracted me to his Dortmund team. In that regard, one of the things that has most soured me on this Arsenal side is how they built themselves up with this sort of football, only to become increasingly conservative and safe in an attempt to get over the line and win things. Yesterday was the first time in a long while, probably over a year, that I have seen then face up to a quality team who they know uses the ball very well, and try to get in their face, disrupt their possession and dictate the game with pressure in the opposition half. After a shaky start they actually fared pretty well and did a much better job of disrupting PSG than we did in that first game. Yet PSG still could have easily come away with 4. That is a really tough thing for a team to take on the chin and does not bode well for going back to Paris.
I think beyond this being a semi final and a milestone moment for the club, this is thing a potentially defining moment for Arteta in how he responds to that - what does he have the confidence to ask his team to do, how clear in his thinking will he be in that ask, will it be aligned with the strengths of the players he brought together to play a certain brand of football and has increasingly asked them to do something else. It is the sort of fork in the road that can cause an era to start to come to an end.
