Arteta agrees with Tuchel on reason for Bayern defeat | OneFootball

Mikel Arteta has agreed with Thomas Tuchel that Arsenal were lacking the experience to win this week’s Champions League quarter-final.

Speaking after Bayern Munich’s win over Arsenal on Wednesday night, Thomas Tuchel suggested that whilst Mikel Arteta might not like to hear it, the one thing his team are lacking is experience.

“For me, they are there (at the elite level),” Tuchel said (via Hayters TV and Kaya Kaynak). “I know that maybe Mikel does not want to hear this, but for me, they are there.

“If you watch Arsenal games in the last two seasons…it’s a consistency of attacking football, of scoring goals, of not conceding goals, it’s fun to watch, it’s every match something to learn, it’s so fluid, it’s so impressive, and at the same time it collects points.

“So for me, they are an elite team. Maybe what they miss a little bit is experience in big games like this.”

But despite Tuchel’s suggestion that Arteta might not want to hear it, the Arsenal head coach agreed with his counterpart’s assessment in his own post-match press conference.

“We haven’t played in this competition for seven years, we haven’t been in this position for 14 years,” Arteta began. “There is a reason for it.

“We want to do everything fast forward, super quick in one season. I thought we had the capacity and the quality to win the [quarter-finals] because the margins have been very small.

“But those margins are coming from something else that maybe we don’t have yet and we have to learn it.

“When you look historically, all the clubs to get to the semi-final stages, it took them seven, eight, some of them ten years to do it.

“Today, that’s not going to make us feel better, that’s for sure.”

The margins were ultimately very small in Arsenal’s defeat to Bayern, drawing the first leg 2-2 before losing the second leg 1-0 for a 3-2 aggregate scoreline.

Considering Arsenal’s missed chances in the first leg, the Bukayo Saka penalty shout, and the goals the Gunners gifted to the away side at the Emirates Stadium, they could have come to the Allianz Arena in a much stronger position.

Instead, the team turned up in Germany knowing that even a very narrow 1-0 defeat would eliminate them, and that’s unfortunately how it panned out.