NAPLES, Italy -- The final hour of this tie was played out amid what, by this arena's standards, was near silence. As the last 20 minutes drew in, the population of Stadio San Paolo's famous "Curvas" thinned out to a fraction of their capacity. Think about what those two sentences mean. They mean that Arsenal came to one of the most feared venues in Europe, faced down a Napoli side that had been strongly tipped to overturn a two-goal deficit, and killed this quarterfinal stone dead against all expectation. It was the kind of performance they are rarely trusted to produce and perhaps it was a vindication, too, of their biggest piece of summer recruitment. Make no mistake, this was...
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