Ahead of the second leg of our Champions League round of 16 tie against Porto, Mikel Arteta has challenged our players to show bravery to book a spot in the last eight.
We trail 1-0 on aggregate after our tie in Portugal three weeks ago, in a tough encounter that saw us struggle to create many attacking opportunities - a far cry from the scoring touch we have uncovered in the Premier League since the turn of the year.
And given a second chance against Porto, the boss wants us to really impose ourselves on our opponents and show courage to create the opportunities needed to get the result that could take us into the quarter-finals of the competition for the first time since 2010.
Speaking in his pre-match press conference, Mikel said: “We’re certainly going to have to tweak a few things to generate much more than what we did against them. That’s the level of the Champions League; you’re facing top teams. The fact that there are two games as well plays on your mind and we’re going to have to be better tomorrow.
“We have to prepare in the best possible way, make a lot of right decisions and then be brave and have the courage to make things happen. You can’t wait in these situations, you have to go and make things happen and that’s the approach tomorrow.”
The first leg at the Estadio do Dragao was a scrappy affair that saw the ball in play for just 50 minutes in total, preventing us from building up any sort of momentum.
However, we managed to overcome a similar scenario against Brentford on Saturday where the ball in play time was even less at 49 minutes, but this time we still managed to grind out a crucial win and Mikel hopes that we’ve learnt from the encounter in Portugal and wants us to stay cool should a similar type of game arise.
“Every week, every opponent has their strengths and weaknesses and the way that they approach the game,” he added. “Now we know them a bit better. We have played these kind of games many times in the Premier League, we played one two days ago. We’ll just focus on being ourselves and do more of the things that we can control better than we did a few weeks ago.
“The game context is very important and we know that we have a long match to play and there can be moments when things go your way and moments that can change dramatically quickly. Emotionally we have to be very prepared to play in those games.”
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