Arsenal are back in the Champions League semi-finals, and this time they know the road ahead. The Premier League club advanced past Sporting CP after a 0-0 draw in the second leg in Lisbon on Wednesday, going through on aggregate after Kai Havertz’s 91st-minute winner gave them a 1-0 first-leg advantage last week at the Estadio Jose Alvalade.
The result kept Arsenal as the only unbeaten team in this season’s Champions League and sent them into the last four for the second successive season. They had already made clear they are no one-hit run in this competition, having topped the league phase with a 100 per cent record before beating Bayer Leverkusen 3-1 on aggregate in the last 16.
Their semi-final opponent will be Atletico Madrid, who survived a nervy all-LaLiga tie against Barcelona. Atletico lost 2-1 at home in the second leg at the Metropolitano Stadium, but did enough over the two legs to advance after Ademola Lookman’s first-half goal proved crucial. Barcelona had raced ahead through Lamine Yamal and Ferran Torres, and Eric Garcia was sent off late on.
For Arsenal, the draw was already mapped out before the Sporting second leg, so the next step had been sitting in front of them while they finished the job in Lisbon. That did not make the night any less tense. A 0-0 away from home was enough, but only because Havertz had already delivered in the 91st minute the previous week.
The bigger picture is hard to miss. Arsenal’s only final appearance came in 2005/06, when they lost 2-1 to Barcelona in Paris. Two decades later, they are one round away from returning to the same stage, with Atletico now standing between them and a place in the final.
The Spaniards have already shown how thin the margin can be. Arsenal have shown something else: a perfect league-phase run, an unbeaten knockout campaign so far and a habit of finding the result when the match turns tight. The next step now comes against an Atletico side that reached this point by surviving their own scare.
