Let me explains the way forward for the Premier League's beleaguered Champions League hopefuls.
There was no more irritating noise in football than the one certain Arsenal followers insisted on uttering last season every time their team won a goal kick. “Ospinaaaaaah” they would shout as their goalkeeper hoofed the ball forward, a vocal interjection followed – no matter how many times it was heard during a game – by a smug chuckle.
This summer it appeared we had heard the last of it. Thearrival of Petr Cech signalled not only a proper, class act in the Arsenal goal, but also someone whose name did not lend itself to such annoying inanities.
On Tuesday night, however, for some reason known only to Arsene Wenger, David Ospina was back. And this time no one at the Emirates was singing his name after his howler of an own goal set his side on the route to European ignominy.
Surely the whole point of signing Cech was to provide security in important matches. But, clearly rendered complacent by Olympiacos’s wretched record of twelve successive European defeats on English soil, Wenger rested his new signing ahead of Sunday’s game with Manchester United. The result: the kind of howling error that was meant to be eliminated by bringing the former Chelsea stalwart to the club.
Not that the Colombian keeper was wholly to blame for a night of considerable English embarrassment. AlexisSanchez apart, Arsenal were lame and lacklustre.
Meanwhile, Chelsea were once again this season second rate, losing at Porto, a fixture that might be renamed the Jorge Mendes derby after the super-agent who controls most of the personnel of both clubs.
It means that after two rounds of Champions League fixtures this season, English clubs have lost five matches out of six, easily the worst return by the representatives of the world’s most self-congratulatory league since the competition began.
Between 2003-04 and 2010-11, for instance, the most games lost by English clubs across the whole group stage was five.
[TWITTER REACTS: ‘I’d rather have Petr Cech’s helmet in goal than David Ospina’]
And the worst thing is, Manchester City’s loss to Juventusapart, the losses have not come against the giants of Europe. It is not against representatives of Spain or Germany that English teams have come up short. It is not Barcelona or Bayern humiliating them, it is not Milan or Madrid. It is clubs from Portugal, Croatia, Holland and Greece, teams playing in leagues with a fraction of the Premier League’s financial muscle.
This is not some sort of blip, either. Five defeats out of six matches is a pattern.
Arsene Wenger shows his frustration - Reuters
The quick and ready excuse from the defeated has been about increased domestic competition. The steepling rise in television revenues has allowed the mid-ranking teams to recruit on a higher scale than ever before. In the case of the likes of Sadio Mane, Saido Berahino and John Stones, it has also allowed them to keep hold of those coveted by the richer, Champions League elite.
As a result, on any given weekend, any club can beat any other. It is what makes the Premier League so excitingly random and unpredictable.
[HE'S NOT WRONG, YOU KNOW: ASASD]
Those thrills are what sells the English top flight across the globe. But it also means that clubs cannot rest senior personnel ahead of European games in the way those in Spain and Germany can, in the certain knowledge that they are sufficiently superior to acquire the necessary domestic points without them.
There is something in that. But it does not excuse what happened last night. Even doing the reverse of what the Spanish giants do and resting top performers in Europe ahead of domestic challenges at the weekend, Arsenal and Chelsea should have had enough in the squad to beat off the opposition they faced.
Arsenal's Chilean striker Alexis Sanchez (L) takes on Olympiakos's Swiss midfielder Pajtim Kasami (R) during the UEFA Champions League Group F football match between Arsenal and Olympiakos at The Emirates Stadium in north London on September 29, 2015 - AFP
Besides, to claim competition is somehow counter-productive is to misunderstand the entire purpose of sport. You can bet if the domestic league were a stroll, our Champions League clubs would use that as an excuse, insisting that their players weren’t properly tested at home.
No, there is something much more significant going on here. This is the result of gathering complacency coinciding with reducing technical and tactical agility.
For whatever reason it is, the quality of defending by English league teams has fallen behind those on the continent. Watching Olympiacos last night, they defended with a tenacity and discipline rarely seen here, a solid line of blue shirts easily sufficient to withstand every tricksy Arsenal approach in the last ten minutes.
Yet this is the same Olympiacos who shipped three goals without reply in their first game in the group against Bayern. So they aren’t even that good. They were, however, a whole lot better than the home side at the lost art of keeping the ball out of their own net (though it helped their goalkeeper didn’t throw it in there himself).
[UNSTOPPABLE BAYERN: Lewandowski hits hat-trick as Bayern score five past Dinamo]
All English clubs are being undone by their defending. Chelsea’s last night was rotten, shipping goals that will have had Jose Mourinho, a man who values nothing more than a clean sheet, tearing out his hair.
Jose Mourinho shouts at his players as Chelsea lose to Porto - AFP
Why is it? It is not that they are unable to afford to bring in good players (though in truth the very best remain somehow tantalisingly out of reach). But for some reason they seem to reduce in the harum scarum rush of the Premier League, where it doesn’t matter if you let in a goal, the opposition defence will be so porous you always have the chance of getting one back.
Liverpool won the European Cup four times and Nottingham Forest twice in the seventies and eighties by shutting up shop away from home and scaring the living daylights out of the opposition once on their own turf. English hopes would undoubtedly improve if they could learn how to shut up shop like their predecessors did so effectively.
Arsenal’s failure to do just thathas now removed their margin for error. After two defeats in their opening matches, they can still qualify for the knock out stages.
But it will require not only reversing the defeats against Olympiacos and Zagreb, but also picking up a win and probably also a draw against Bayern.
They won’t do that unless they defend with a little more tenacity. And it would help their manager’s cause, clearly, if he put Cech back in goal.
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