Arsenal were forced to settle for a hard-fought 1-1 draw in the first leg of their Champions League semi-final with Atletico Madrid on Wednesday, but they will feel aggrieved to have been denied a late penalty that could have won it after Viktor Gyokeres and Julian Alvarez had already traded spot-kicks either side of half-time.<\/p>\n
The visitors controlled a cagey first period, which culminated in Gyokeres blasting home after he was clumsily bundled over in the area by David Hancko. David Raya had been forced into a good save from a fine Alvarez strike and Noni Madueke went close at the other end with a curling effort, but otherwise it was a half of few chances.<\/p>\n
However, it was a different story after the break as Arsenal relinquished that control and found themselves clinging on at times. Alvarez levelled with a penalty of his own 10 minutes into the second 45 after Ben White was punished for a handball. That preceded a flurry of close calls for the Gunners, most notably Raya’s close-range stop from Ademola Lookman, Gabriel Magalhaes’ incredible block to deny Antoine Griezmann and the Frenchman hitting the woodwork.<\/p>\n
Arsenal thought they had the third spot-kick of the night and a chance to win the game with just 10 minutes to play, as substitute Eberechi Eze went down under another Hancko challenge – but the referee controversially reversed his decision after consulting the pitch-side monitor. Their frustration was almost compounded in added time, but thankfully Nahuel Molina’s drive flew just over as the Gunners were made to settle for a creditable first-leg draw.<\/p>\n
GOAL rates Arsenal’s players from the Metropolitano…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Arsenal were forced to settle for a hard-fought 1-1 draw in the first leg of their Champions League…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14461,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[366,5047,187,418,82,417,8392],"class_list":{"0":"post-14460","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-madrid","8":"tag-arsenal","9":"tag-atletico-madrid-vs-arsenal","10":"tag-champions-league","11":"tag-features","12":"tag-madrid","13":"tag-player-ratings","14":"tag-v-gyoekeres"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14460\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}