Old flaws harpoon Arsenal in Champions League

Arsenal supporters accustomed to seeing their team qualify for the Champions League year after year are beginning to adjust to a new routine: wretched elimination in the competition's last 16.
Wednesday's crushing 3-1 home defeat by Monaco left Arsenal on the brink of a fifth successive last-16 exit, after previous humblings at the hands of Barcelona, AC Milan and, in the previous two seasons, Bayern Munich.
Against Monaco, things were supposed to be different. The Ligue 1 club were appearing in the knockout phase for the first time in 10 years, had scored only four goals in the group stage and were missing key players.
But Leonardo Jardim's team allied intelligent defending with clinical counter-attacking at the Emirates Stadium to leave beaten manager Arsene Wenger lamenting a "suicidal" defensive display from his side.
Taking on the club where he had made his name as a manager in the late 1980s, it should have been a great occasion for Wenger.
Instead it echoed the outcome of his 1,000th match at the Arsenal helm last season, when, after a similar pre-game love-in, his team had been torn apart in a 6-0 defeat at Chelsea.
Arsenal's defensive naivety and gung-ho attacking have long been used as sticks with which to beat Wenger, but his side seemed to have turned over a new leaf in last month's 2-0 victory at Manchester City.
After years of one-sided losses to rivals, Wenger appeared, belatedly, to have grasped the importance of defensive shape and to have accepted that a team can cede control of possession and still prevail.
But against Monaco, and despite the fact Arsenal fielded £90 million ($139.6 million, 122.9 million euros) of attacking talent in Alexis Sanchez, Danny Welbeck and Mesut Ozil, all the old failings returned.
Arsenal's play was slow and stodgy and saw them fail to exploit Monaco's inexperience in defence, where 18-year-old right-back Almamy Toure was making only his third professional appearance.
- 'Clueless, pathetic, shambolic' -
Analysing the game for Sky Sports, former Arsenal great Thierry Henry observed: "There was no real pace on the pass, no sense of urgency to win the game."
Meanwhile, Henry's successor as Arsenal's attacking spearhead, Olivier Giroud, endured a uniquely terrible evening, failing to find the target with any of his six attempts at goal.
One effort, ballooned over the crossbar from six yards after Danijel Subasic had saved from Sanchez, prompted howls of disbelief. Writing in The Guardian newspaper, Barney Ronay likened Giroud to a "wandering wardrobe".
It was Arsenal's kamikaze response to Geoffrey Kongdogbia's deflected 38th-minute opener that was to prove their real undoing, however.
Twice Monaco punished the home team for pushing too high up the pitch in the second half, which former England striker Gary Lineker described on Twitter as "beyond amateurish".
Underpinning the defeat was an overall lack of application that the Daily Telegraph summarised in the stark headline, "CLUELESS, PATHETIC, SHAMBOLIC", adding that Wenger's job was now "under threat".
To keep Arsenal's Champions League campaign alive, the long-serving 65-year-old must become the first manager to oversee an aggregate victory in the competition's knockout phase after a 3-1 home loss in the first leg.
More widely, Arsenal's fans fear that the club has become trapped in a cycle of just-tolerable mediocrity: always qualifying for the Champions League, but always failing when they get there.
The one consolation is that Arsenal are not the only English team to have fluffed their lines in the Champions League, with Chelsea drawing 1-1 at Paris Saint-Germain and City losing 2-1 at home to Barcelona.
It has prompted fears that England's major clubs are losing ground in Europe, despite the vast wealth of the Premier League, but in Arsenal's case, the problems are all of their own making.
Source: AFP