How the Champions League provides the opportunity to stop Arsenal’s season from unravelling

To see the Arsenal squad at training this week, you wouldn’t necessarily think they were about to play for just a second Champions League final in their history. So many people at the club say they’ve just been more relaxed, and that’s actually been the case for every European game this season.

It has been a quirk of this otherwise arduously laboured campaign. There’s been so much focus on the Premier League and everything that great quest represents, that the greatest trophy in club football has almost been… overlooked.

And yet here they are, the squad newly abuzz.

“That’s the way we are all feeling,” Mikel Arteta said, “and that’s the energy that I feel amongst the team and the club. This is the stage that we want to be, that we have earned.”

The wonder is whether that feeling of freedom changes depending on how this week goes.

If Arsenal fail to beat Fulham at home, or if they get past Atletico Madrid as a title looks to pass them by, the Champions League will carry an even greater weight than it already does.

Victory would not just save a season, after all. It would transform it.

A season that has been cast as potentially descending into the worst “bottle job” of all time could still become the most magical in the club’s history.

And now, as they get a feel for the Metropolitano pitch, the grand trophy comes into sight for the first time. That may change the feeling. It may bring pressure, where there has previously been little.

All of that also comes amid an awareness that even getting to the Champions League final may have another effect. It will give the club an immense lift, a wave that potentially carries them to a title.

Arteta has naturally been keen to concentrate on such positives, to cast everything as an opportunity or “a privilege”.

It’s just that few others would necessarily describe playing a Diego Simeone side in a Champions League knock-out as a “privilege”. It tends to be a battle.

They’re “very, very competitive,” as Martin Odegaard put it, with some understatement. Arteta meanwhile praised the “communion” between the team, the manager, the club and even this relatively new stadium. No concerns about moving the atmosphere from their great old ground at Vicente Calderon here. They all come together for nights like this, as they showed against Barcelona in the quarter-final.

That stadium may this time be soaked by a rainstorm, deepening the sense of a game that has to be endured.

Atletico’s own ferocity may then be fired by how much much more desperate for this they are than Arsenal. It isn’t a break from anything for them. Atletico have no domestic title challenge. They last week lost the Copa Del Rey final to Real Sociedad.

That has only intensified the will to give Antoine Griezmannthe send-off he deserves before going off to MLS, to fittingly crown an entire era at the club.

Atletico have so much unfinished business in this competition, and this is the first time in the Simeone era when they have got further than Real Madrid - the local rivals that have eliminated them on five occasions.

It all means that this semi-final pairs the two biggest clubs not to have won the Champions League.

If that reality has only deepened a pressure on Arsenal from underwhelming recent performances, they haven’t been playing anywhere near as disappointingly as Atletico. Simeone's side have only two wins from nine.

This is far from a great Atletico. It is not just that they don’t defend like they used to, it is that they can’t. Simeone doesn’t have the quality. They’ve been porous.

An argument even persists in Spain that one of the reasons they’re here is because Barcelona have their own Champions League complex about Atletico.

That may feel harsh, but Arsenal shouldn’t forget they have already beaten Atletico 4-0 this season in this very competition. That shouldn’t breed any complacency, either, since another huge reason that Atletico are here is because they are still able to fight. The win over Barcelona was also a lesson in defiance.

A lot has changed since October. Arteta naturally said this game “is going to be a very different one”.

For one, Arsenal just don’t attack in the way they did over that period. In fact, they really have no one on the form of Griezmann, or even Julian Alvarez, who Simeone remarkably admitted that Arsenal want.

Such a difference could yet decide this. One other lament from Griezmann’s impending departure is that he genuinely looks like he’s gone to another level. It is as if he is a rare example of one of those players who has become better with age because his experience has only deepened an exceptional football intelligence. There are moments when it seems he can see all of the pitch all at once. Look at the touch for Alvarez’s breakaway goal against Tottenham Hotspur, or his own elegant finish in the same game.

One description within Atletico - especially since he is off to the States - is that Griezmann has become “the quarter-back”. Not necessarily in terms of position but just being the cerebrum of the side. There’s a sophistication to his movement that facilitates the creativity of his play. He’s now beyond a complete player.

Arsenal, to be blunt, currently have no one of that class.

Odegaard and Eberechi Eze have the potential to end up as that. Kai Havertz, absent here, has some of the touches. Viktor Gyokeres has been a disappointment.

A lot of arguments could be repeated here about whether some of this is down to Arteta’s constraints, whether they’re too controlled, whether they just need superior signings.

A problem for Griezmann and Atletico, on the other side, is that they are playing one of the most robust defensive structures in Europe.

Arteta again sought to change the emphasis.

“Now is the moment to make a statement and show how good we are, how much we want it, and make it happen; it's clear. The opportunity is in front of us, and we have to attack it."

This air of greater freedom in Europe may help, especially for a game like this.

“What an opportunity we're going to grab with both hands," Arteta said.

Victory here may even be the difference between both trophies and none.

Except, as the feeling around the Metropolitano itself only emphasises, this is the one trophy that stands above everything. The Arsenal players will now be all too aware of that.

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