If Arsenal are to win the Champions League for the first time, they are going to have to do it the hard way.
But not quite the impossible way. And that is something.
This was a curious game at the Emirates in many ways. Cacophonous pre-match noise gave way to shocked silence when Ousmane Dembele ended a five-match scoring drought with his 25th goal of 2025 with the first meaningful attack of the game.
For the next 15 minutes or so, PSG threatened to blow Arsenal away. Whether PSG are the continent’s best team right now is a tough question to answer, but we don’t think there’s anyone out there whose very best football is better than theirs.
They toyed with Arsenal at points, the sheer speed of their passing, their movement, their thought just too much for an objectively excellent home team.
In those early moments – and again in the closing 10 minutes or so – it could have got incredibly ugly for Arsenal. They could absolutely have been out of the tie by full-time of the home leg.
And yet for large spells in the middle, Arsenal looked the better team. But for two huge saves from Gianluigi Donnarumma – who got all his Emirates errors out of the way in the league game between the two – Arsenal would have emerged at least level and nobody could really argue that was some grave injustice.
Both teams did a lot of things very well at different times in a game never less than captivating despite the fussy and inconsistent efforts of the referee.
There were all manner of curious yellow cards awarded and not awarded here, with the kindest thing to be said about the chaotic nature of their award (or not) that it was sufficiently chaotic that there could be no real suggestion of bias in it.
Still, though, the most significant yellow card of this night was one handed out a fortnight ago in Madrid. Thomas Partey was a sucker in those closing minutes, and Arsenal missed him terribly in the opening spell tonight where their whole season felt in peril.
At the very least it’s hard to conceive of Ousmane Dembele being allowed as he was to saunter so freely and unopposed through the Arsenal midfield to start a move he would then finish after being teed up by the wonderful Khvicha Kvaratskhelia.
Kvaratskhelia was the standout threat in the opening exchanges, reducing a petrified Jurrien Timber – generally such a reliably effective one-v-one defender – to something approaching Maicon-against-Bale territory.
He might have won a penalty; there was clear contact from Timber as he put his arm across the Georgian’s chest, but so theatrically and obviously did Kvaratskhelia go looking for it that he may well have stitched himself up.
Arsenal rode out the storm, though, and ended the first half on top and pretty unlucky to find themselves still behind.
Mikel Merino thought he’d put that right in the early seconds of the second, only for his header from a Declan Rice free-kick – currently the most dangerous weapon known to Champions League football, of course – to be ruled out for offside after a mere three minutes.
It was absurd that it took so long for VAR to get there when at first glance there appeared to be six Arsenal players who had failed to get back into onside positions from what we would contend was an unnecessarily over-elaborate free-kick routine that came close to performative dance and just hinted that Nicolas Jover might be in danger of getting high on his own farts.
Equally baffling was how long it took the Amazon Prime commentary team to stop acting like it was definitely a goal when even from the first replay we saw it was at best VAR-botheringly tight.
It was a sign, though, and Arsenal had perhaps their best spell in the minutes that followed. This was a match in which every event, no matter how minor, was followed by frantic waving of geeing-up arms toward the crowd. There was a febrile feeling inside this ground that surpassed even the Real Madrid game.
Arsenal couldn’t quite sustain it, though, with a Leandro Trossard shot phenomenally diverted wide down low to his left by Donnarumma the closest the Gunners came before PSG reasserted a degree of control.
Unlike the rapid early blitz of their early dominance, PSG regained the ascendancy by slowing the game to a walking pace, forcing Arsenal’s passing game sideways and down blind alleys.
It was a reminder that this is a PSG side unlike previous ones. An actual team, for one thing, and one that has more than one way to do things.
But there remains the unmistakable hint of ever-so-slightly soft underbelly. They can be rattled. It needs chaos, though. Aston Villa rattled PSG out of their comfort zone in the last round, and there are lessons there for how Arsenal approach the fiendishly difficult but absolutely not impossible task of overturning a deficit in the away leg.
PSG will know it can be done, having done it themselves to Liverpool in the last 16. And the last North London team to find themselves 1-0 down after the home leg of a Champions League semi-final against a technically superior side found a route out of it, albeit not one we could particularly advise anyone to follow.
Arsenal will absolutely have their moments and their chances in Paris. They just have to make sure they still matter by the time they come around. And then take them. It can be done.
