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It is one of football’s great cliches: 2-0 is the most dangerous lead. It is never more dangerous than in an aggregate scoreline with the trailing side playing at home in the second leg.This week’s Women’s Champions League served two perfect examples in London. On Wednesday, Arsenal hosted Real Madrid, trailing 2-0 from the away game in Spain. On Thursday, Chelsea welcomed Manchester City to Stamford Bridge in the same situation.
Like London buses, you wait for one 2-0 comeback to be overturned, and then two come along at once.
In north London, Arsenal were boosted by a record crowd for a Champions League quarter-final in England: 22,517. There was a coordinated waving of flags and a more organic twirling of scarves. Real Madrid had brought only around 50 fans. They, and their team, were up against long odds.
Arsenal head coach Renee Slegers’ approach in Madrid might have been too bold: an attack-minded 4-4-2, which wasn’t ideal for scrapping in the terrible mudbath dished up by Real. The problem was that 2-0 down, she needed to take the game to Real again. So she was bold in a different way on Wednesday night, fielding Mariona Caldentey in a deep midfield role alongside Kim Little.
Crucially, Arsenal’s back four are technical and creative. Katie McCabe is a converted winger playing at left-back, Steph Catley is a converted left-back playing at centre-back, Leah Williamson is a converted midfielder playing at centre-back, and Emily Fox is one of the most hard-running right-backs around. They, as much as the players further forward, were crucial in Arsenal imposing themselves inside the opposition half.
The attacking threat largely came down Arsenal’s right. Chloe Kelly, the surprise January loan signing from Manchester City, is a multifaceted player. She can defend, she can dribble, she can score. Against Real Madrid, she crossed. And crossed and crossed. In the first half, Caitlin Foord twice nearly turned home Kelly’s first-half deliveries. Olga Carmona, Real’s left-back who scored the World Cup-winning goal two years ago and lifted the trophy as captain, simply couldn’t cope. Real, for their part, offered relatively little counter-attacking threat, in stark contrast to their display in a surprise win at Barcelona on Sunday.
At half-time, the scoreline was 0-0. As Slegers explained afterwards, the mood in the dressing room was composed. “If we don’t stay calm, we’re not gonna find the solution, so everyone was calm,” she said. “It was 0-0, but we were dominant, it was just about the details. I could see in the player’s eyes that they were believing and calm. They were very determined in a very good way.
“We spoke about how we have such a great squad, so many players who can come in and make a difference, and Real Madrid doesn’t,” Slegers continued, in a typically blunt fashion. “They will get tired at some point. They haven’t had the ball a lot, and they’ve been in their own half a lot. We also looked a bit at what spaces we could find in the final third.”
That is Slegers’ specialism, the tactical side. Before the game, she had spoken to the players about finding space in Real’s left-back zone.
“It looked a little bit different on the left and on the right because of how they defended those spaces,” Slegers explained. “But also because of the different qualities we have on both sides. So the left side was more combination play and dribbling, and on the right side was more crossing. We played to Chloe Kelly’s strength today really well. But also, Madrid gave her the opportunity to play to her strengths.”
Sure enough, Arsenal continued to feed the ball out to Kelly, who swung in crosses.
Alessia Russo converted one at the far post, lingering deep when Real’s right-back, Sheila Garcia, got dragged out of position. The second came from another Kelly cross, with Caldentey motoring forward from deep to nod home. Arsenal’s third came from Russo, slamming home a loose ball at a set piece. Marginal offside decisions twice denied her a hat-trick. Arsenal needed two good saves from Daphne van Domselaar to preserve their clean sheet and ultimately, they won the tie by a single goal. At the same time, it felt routine because they stuck to the plan and remained calm.
The following day, in west London, Chelsea did things the other way around. Arsenal scored their three goals after the break, but Chelsea found themselves 3-0 up by half-time. It wasn’t an unfair reflection of their dominance on Thursday in the win over Manchester City.
A key element of Chelsea’s superiority was physicality. With 20-year-old City centre-back Gracie Prior looking nervous as she made a couple of errors against the more dominant Mayra Ramirez, captain Laia Aleixandri tried to take charge, getting tight to Ramirez and jumping into tackles quickly. But she was also overpowered by the Colombian, as was holding midfielder Yui Hasegawa, who stood little chance in a midfield battle between the two. Aleixandri’s armband kept slipping down her arm throughout the game, which somehow felt symbolic.
Manchester City’s midfield trio of Hasegawa, Jill Roord and Vivianne Miedema is as technical as you’ll see, but in their fourth consecutive match against Chelsea, City surely needed someone to offer some extra bite. It was no surprise that, by the end of the game, City ended up with an entirely different midfield trio: Aleixandri in the holding role, behind substitutes Jess Park and Laura Coombs. Nick Cushing’s side had been overrun in the middle.
Just as Arsenal’s winger Kelly had done much of the damage from the flank the previous night, Chelsea made inroads down the wings. Where Kelly was primarily a crosser, Chelsea’s wingers were ball carriers. Down the right, Johanna Rytting Kaneryd is one of the most effective ball-carriers in European football, even if her end product is sometimes lacking. Down the left, Lauren James is superb in tight spaces. They weren’t responsible for scoring the goals, but they provided the intensity and helped Chelsea pile on the pressure.
In a sense, it was a role reversal. Arsenal’s defenders had set the tone for a dominant performance, and then their attacking players scored the goals. Chelsea’s attacking players set the tone, and their defenders scored the first two goals. Sandy Baltimore’s brilliantly struck opener was significant not merely because it came from their left-back, but also because it was a rebound after their right-back Lucy Bronze had dribbled through the City defence and hit the post. The second goal came from centre-back Nathalie Bjorn — it had been her third headed effort of the game from a set piece.
And just like at the Emirates the previous evening, once the first and second goals went in, the third felt inevitable. Ramirez applied the scuffed finish from James’ pull-back. But then came arguably the most impressive aspect of Chelsea’s display. Having started off chasing the tie, they were now defending a lead, and City barely laid a glove on them for the second 45 minutes. So what had manager Sonia Bompastor said at the break, considering Chelsea had gone from 2-0 down, to 3-2 up?
“When you turn things around in 45 minutes, and score three goals and create a lot of opportunities, the players get excited, so it’s important to get the right balance,” she said. “I told them to adjust two or three things in terms of tactics, but also to tell them we need to go into the second half with the same mindset, wanting to score goals, and with the same high pressure — because when you stop playing (attacking football) it’s more difficult to play with the same intentions as the first half. Sometimes it’s difficult as you get tired, but we tried to do that.”
It was exactly what Slegers had said the previous evening. Adjust some details, but keep on with the same plan.
This is the second time in three years that London has offered two of the final four in this competition. Two years ago, both were narrowly defeated, with Arsenal losing 5-4 in a thrilling tie against Wolfsburg and Chelsea falling 2-1 in a tighter contest against Barcelona, the same aggregate scoreline they were defeated by against the same opposition in the same round last season.
Both clubs will start the next round as underdogs, with Arsenal facing Lyon and Chelsea — yet again — up against Barcelona. Both sides appear more tactically intelligent than two years ago, and maybe they’re a touch calmer, too.
If either goes two goals down in the next round, both have proven they are capable of turning things around.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Arsenal, Chelsea, UK Women's Football
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