Sunday’s crisis is Thursday’s radiant beacon of hope. Arsenal had spent the week fending off the brickbats hurled following their shoddy collapse at Watford; Eintracht Frankfurt had passed it feeling justifiably optimistic that their unbeaten home run in Europe, stretching 16 games and 13 years, would be extended. However they had prepared, nobody could have anticipated the way Unai Emery’s reshuffled team, driven on thrillingly by the youngsters Bukayo Saka and Joe Willock, put context aside and created an unforgettable night of their own.
Is there a club in England that swings so wildly between poles of optimism and despair? Reasons for the former abounded here; those seeking some sort of middle ground will caution that it was a minor miracle Arsenal kept a clean sheet in a game whose openness bordered on the comical. But it felt like confirmation that this generation of academy products is bold and bright enough to trouble top-level opponents regularly.
Saka, in particular, was simply too lively for Eintracht to handle from his perch on the left and with Arsenal’s frontline options stretched it is hardly fanciful to envisage him being set upon Premier League defences soon.
Saka had begun presenting the case for that within five minutes, clipping over a cross from which Lucas Torreira should have scored. Arsenal missed other chances before the winger, who turned 18 a fortnight ago, made his latest dart into space and passed to Willock, who is two years his senior. There was good fortune in Willock’s finish, which spun into the net via a deflection off David Abraham and a ricochet off the crossbar, but the away side earned their luck throughout.
“Their performance tonight was good and they deserve it,” Emery said of his players, only four of whom remained from the starting lineup at Vicarage Road. The blend of youth and experience continued to pay dividends in a second half during which it became almost impossible to keep up with the number of openings for each side.
One driving run from Willock, showcasing the mixture of tenacity and composure that characterised an outstanding individual performance, forced Martin Hinteregger into a last-ditch challenge on Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang. Willock and Saka were then both denied by Kevin Trapp, while a free-kick from Granit Xhaka swung beyond everybody and struck the bar.
Eventually Saka’s sheer insistence caused Eintracht to collapse late on. First he drew a foul from Dominik Kohr, who had already been booked, and the home midfielder was sent off. Then, afforded a yard of space around the edge of the area, he set his sights and curled a slick left-foot effort into Trapp’s far corner; quite some way to score a first senior goal. There were five minutes left but straightaway he played in Aubameyang, who presumably did not mind being burdened with another full 90 minutes when his youthful teammates were performing as joyfully as this, for a characteristically decisive finish.
“With his goal, with his performance, but also taking confidence in the match, finishing really strongly physically,” Emery said when asked what had pleased him about Saka’s display. While hardly effusive, he also praised Willock and also made sure to talk up the 19-year-old Emile Smith Rowe, who did well on the right of the attack. It is no slight on his work that his teammates stole the show, and if he had beaten Trapp after being played through when the tie was goalless the conversation may conceivably have centred on his contribution.
By contrast it was a night in which Eintracht had to fish around for positives. The forwards who propelled them to the semi-finals last season – Luka Jovic, Sébastien Haller and Ante Rebic – have all moved on and they were sorely missed. While David Luiz and Shkodran Mustafi, the latter back from the cold, both performed respectably nobody would pretend this was a stingy defensive effort from Arsenal. Bas Dost and André Silva, this season’s Eintracht strikers, both missed chances and the goalkeeper Emiliano Martínez was periodically called upon to impress.
“It’s a bad defeat because the result and the performance do not fit each other,” their manager, Adi Hütter, said. If anyone wanted to burst Arsenal’s latest bubble they could fairly point out that was true. But the scares at one end were, on this occasion, worth it for the vibrancy shown at the other.
“I want to create a big spirit, working tonight,” Emery said. “Sometimes we are going to have a plan and use different players.” What talents they are; what a perplexing, maddening and utterly compelling proposition Arsenal continue to be.
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