As Arsenal look to win the Premier League for the first time since the Invincibles they face a Champions League trip to Bayern Munich that has parallels with their historic 2003-04 season.
April 2004: Arsenal are approaching the decisive closing stages of a season that promises the biggest domestic and European prizes. But after drawing the first leg of their Champions League quarter-final, they suffer a damaging defeat in their match immediately before the return leg. Suddenly their whole campaign is in the balance.
That was 20 years ago this month, and the second leg only deepened the sense of a season’s work unravelling. Days after Arsenal saw their FA Cup hopes extinguished in a 1-0 semi-final defeat to Manchester United, Wayne Bridge’s 87th-minute goal for Chelsea at Highbury dumped them out of the Champions League. It was a brutal one-two that left them reeling.
Fast-forward to the present day and Arsenal will be trying desperately to avoid a repeat. Having been toppled from the Premier League summit on Sunday by a 2-0 home loss to Aston Villa, they must quickly pick themselves up for the away leg of their Champions League quarter-final with Bayern Munich, which is poised at 2-2, on Wednesday.
That Champions League exit at the hands of Chelsea felt like a missed opportunity at the time. Arsenal trailed for just nine minutes over both legs, played part of the first match against 10 men and then led at Highbury. While the west Londonders were enjoying the first flushes of Roman Abramovich’s largesse, this was before Jose Mourinho arrived to turn them into serial winners.
The sense of a golden chance that went begging has only grown with time. Perhaps in part due to a new knockout format, the Champions League was wide open – and there for the taking – that season. United, Juventus and Bayern fell in the last 16, Real Madrid and AC Milan in the quarter-finals. Mourinho’s Porto beat Monaco in a final few would have predicted.
This time, opportunity knocks because this is not a vintage Bayern side. Outstanding individuals such as Jamal Musiala, Joshua Kimmich and Manuel Neuer abound – and Harry Kane can be relied upon for a goal, especially against Arsenal – but they have underachieved and manager Thomas Tuchel is the proverbial dead man walking, just as Claudio Ranieri was at Chelsea.
Once again, there is a bigger picture that makes the stakes feel much higher. Elimination in Germany at the hands of the six-time European champions would be no disgrace in isolation, but a defeat at this stage of the season would trigger inevitable comparisons with fatal stumbles in the last two run-ins and threaten to plunge them into a downward spiral.
Arsenal are aiming to avoid a Champions League quarter-final defeat to Bayern Munich which would echoe the Invincibles’ exit against Chelsea in 2004
Keen students of English football history – or anyone familiar with the story of the Invincibles – will know that 2003-04 Arsenal managed to bounce back from European elimination in the next game against Liverpool, although they went behind twice before Thierry Henry steadied the nerves – and unsteadied Jamie Carragher’s feet – with a virtuoso hat-trick.
In the mythology around Arsenal’s historic season, it is often forgotten how close it came to imploding. But that was arguably the club’s finest team of all time, who had been English champions twice in the previous six years, and they passed that test of their resolve. In the closest title race for years, Mikel Arteta’s current side will want to avoid another one.