Arsenal face an uphill battle to reach the Champions League final after being beaten by PSG in the first leg of their semi-final and Alan Shearer believes he knows who is to blame
Alan Shearer pointed the finger at Thomas Partey for Arsenal’s defeat to PSG on Tuesday night. The Gunners slipped to a 1-0 loss in the first leg of their Champions League semi-final against Luis Enrique’s men.
Ousmane Dembele scored the only goal of the game just three minutes in when he swept the ball home from Joao Neves’ cutback. It leave Mikel Arteta’s side facing an uphill battle to reach their first Champions League final since 2006.
For next week’s second leg at the Parc des Princes, they will be boosted by the return of key midfielder Partey. The Ghanaian was suspended for Tuesday’s defeat after being booked in the closing stages of the quarter-final win over Real Madrid.
That booking meant he was forced to sit out the first leg against PSG. In his place, boss Arteta opted to drop Mikel Merino back into midfield from his role as an emergency striker.
Declan Rice was then shifted into Partey’s deep-lying role, having featured heavily in a similar position for West Ham. But Shearer has insisted that PSG’s early goal could have been stopped had Partey been on the pitch.
READ MORE: Mikel Arteta makes honest admission over Arsenal’s Champions League second leg at PSGREAD MORE: PSG boss Luis Enrique provides Ousmane Dembele injury update ahead of Arsenal second leg
He said in commentary on Prime Video: “I’m not sure they would’ve got that ball into Dembele in the third minute. I think he [Partey] would have been there sweeping it up. You can’t allow them to pass it from back to front. What a start for PSG!”
Arteta conceded after the game that his side had been missing something in their first leg defeat. But he refused to specify exactly what had gone wrong, insisting that it had already been corrected.
“The first 15-20 minutes, especially them scoring so early in a great combination, playing when the margins as so small, the finishing is unbelievable. And then we had especially one issue that we corrected after 15-20 minutes,” he said.
“We sustained that for the rest of the game, which I think turned the game around. If you want to win the Champions League final, you have to do something special and we’re going to have to do something special in Paris to be there.
“I’m telling you it’s just something that is very specific but very important, especially the way we played. We corrected it and it’s not easy to correct it constantly but we did it and we did it much better.
“And in the end, we have two of our front players one v one with Donnarumma, if they scored the goal, it’s different. He made the saves like he did against Liverpool and Villa and that’s the difference in the Champions League, the margins are so small.
“We had a disallowed goal as well and another two big situations that happened in the game that didn’t go unfortunately our way. If it’s [performance] significantly better, hopefully the result will be significantly different as well.”
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