Arsenal's exhausted players left the pitch bathed in warm applause from supporters who sometimes turn their backs on the sight of adversity but this time stayed on after the final whistle, setting aside their disappointment to salute something that felt like a rebirth.
"Everybody fought together and helped his team-mate," Laurent Koscielny said, summing up the virtues of a performance that seemed more significant than the result. They had gone out the Champions League but the manner of their departure seemed to lift their hopes of hanging on to fourth place in the Premier League and securing qualification for next season's competition.
This was a tie of four halves. Arsenal lost the first one 2-0 and the second by the same score in Italy, won the third 3-0 at home and drew the fourth after Milan's players finally pulled themselves together. No doubt Massimiliano Allegri had used his half-time address to remind them of the humiliation suffered by their predecessors at Liverpool's hands seven years ago – although none of the Italian club's players on the pitch in Istanbul was involved on Tuesday night.
As Arsène Wenger's players fought their way back to the brink of redemption, they gave substance to the Frenchman's frequent expressions of faith in their spirit – a quality long obscured, perhaps, but unearthed as they put the seven-times European champions on the rack. With those three unanswered first-half goals, they took a further giant step in the restoration of their battered pride, making the outcome of the tie seem less significant than the effect of their resilience on the club's morale.
At the heart of their performance was a display by a teenager who will certainly have lodged a few thoughts in the mind of whichever coach is destined to take England to the finals of the European Championship this summer. Injuries to Mikel Arteta, Aaron Ramsey, Abou Diaby, Yossi Benayoun and Francis Coquelin, not to mention the long-term absence of Jack Wilshere, gave Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain a chance to start the match in the centre of midfield, alongside Alex Song and in front of the back four. Not quite the position just behind the front line that he says is the one best suited to his talents, but closer to it than the role on the wing in which he has been nurtured in his early days as a first-team player.
Theo Walcott is still waiting for a similar opportunity to come in from the touchline, where he has been stationed since his arrival six years ago – like Oxlade-Chamberlain, a teenaged prodigy from Southampton. Walcott always believed himself to be better suited to a striker's role, and his goalscoring record with his original club and with England's Under-21s supported his contention, as did his brace of goals in the dramatic 5-2 win in the recent north London derby. He must have been envying the apparent ease with which the 18-year-old Oxlade-Chamberlain, five years his junior, has impressed Wenger with his precocious football intelligence.
Oxlade-Chamberlain took hardly any time at all to make his mark against Milan. Only five minutes had gone when he moved out of his withdrawn starting position and turned up on the left wing, measuring a cross which was turned behind for a corner. He took it himself, whipping it in with his right foot and seeing it cleared for a second corner on the same side.
Once again he delivered a telling effort which snaked in to meet the head of Koscielny, the centre-back's lateral run towards the near post conspicuously unhindered by the presence of defenders who stood and watched him score with the most straightforward of headers. But it was the quality of the corner that had made it possible, although Oxlade-Chamberlain could not quite manage to recreate the same damaging effect when offered two further opportunities from the same quadrant a dozen minutes later.
Three minutes before the interval, with Arsenal now two goals up, came his most influential contribution to an extraordinary first half. Charging at an angle into the right-hand corner of the Milan penalty area, showing the kind of bullocking power and directness associated with Barcelona's Alexis Sánchez, he aimed his run towards the rapidly closing gap between Antonio Nocerino and Djamel Mesbah before sprawling to the ground under the Algerian left back's challenge. Robin van Persie hammered the penalty kick past Christian Abbiati with a force that redoubled the intensity of the message to his team-mates: they were right back in this contest with the chance of a reversal that would make the obliteration of Tottenham's 2-0 lead look like a rehearsal.
Before his withdrawal with 15 minutes left, Oxlade-Chamberlain came close to producing an equaliser that would have sealed the miracle when he bore in from the left to strike a confident 20-yarder that curled past the angle of crossbar and far post. But he had already played his part in a display that surely put Arsenal back in credit with their followers, even the most sceptical of them given a glimpse of a brighter future.
Source: Richard Williams, The Guardian on 7 Mar 12
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