Arsene Wenger wasn’t at all worried when Danny Welbeck stepped up to take his first ever penalty in senior football - because he’s been tucking them away in training.
The England international rolled a confident spot-kick into the bottom corner to equalise against AC Milan and help us to a 3-1 win on the night and a 5-1 aggregate victory.
“Yes it was his first penalty but we worked on it in training a lot,” the boss told Arsenal Player. “He took many penalties and he convinced me that he can be a good penalty-taker.
“Every game he plays makes him stronger and that is very good for Danny, for his confidence, for the fact that he did fight very hard. He scored a penalty that was a vital one, an important one, and he had the mental strength to have a clean finish.”
The manager was delighted with the way we reacted after falling behind to a wonder strike from Milan.
“We played a little bit at the start with the desire to protect our result but as soon as they were 1-0 up you could see that the response was there straight away,” he said.
“I’m happy because it’s never easy to cope mentally with a 2-0 advantage away from home. We have seen that in England with other teams, they struggled after positive results away from home. You are in between [mentally] and that is always dangerous in the game.
“Once we scored the second goal we were never under threat anymore and we qualified in a strong way against a strong side. You are not surprised that they didn’t lose for 14 games in Italy.”
Copyright 2024 The Arsenal Football Club Limited. Permission to use quotations from this article is granted subject to appropriate credit being given to www.arsenal.com as the source.
