Philippe Auclair

I don't agree with them at all.

And I'm not saying that because I'm a staunch Arsenal fan.

And there are actually, you can hear it in my voice, there's absolutely no sour grapes, no regrets whatsoever.

And I think, strangely enough, I can't think of any Arsenal supporter at the moment who feel that they've been let down by their team or anything like that.

I think people are still buzzing, really buzzing.

And I think some of the commentary on Arsenal performance has been honestly, I mean, so biased and so blind because what exactly were they supposed to do?

Yes, there's a wealth of talent in that team, but in attacking terms, nobody compares to Paris Saint-Germain.

That's the first thing.

So what are you supposed to do?

To go head-to-head and try to play fancy football and try to attack, attack, attack, and then lose?

I would put it that way, that Arsenal play to about 96% of their potential and force PSG to play to about 70% of their potential because all of the discourse we're hearing now is a discourse which is based on the result of a penalty shootout.

If you invert the result for the last two shots on goal, we have a completely different discussion, which should already make us think, all right, let's be careful about what we say here because it's also about the context and about we saw what happened at the end and then we take...

We make assumptions as to what should have happened before that.

The other thing I would say is the reason why Arsenal had the lowest possession, I think, in any European final is because PSG are bloody good in that every time Arsenal had the ball and were trying to build from the back, my goodness, that Parisian midfield was on them completely.

I mean, like a rash and so well organized.

And I thought it was personally, I mean, in terms of level, tactical level, one of the best finals I've ever seen.

It was incredible.

It's like two proper heavyweights going for it.

Could they have done it differently?

Yes, but only up to a point.