Europa League quarterfinals return leg.
Arsenal move to the final four with the win in Italy at Napoli 1-0. The Gunners played the perfect game and manage to keep two clean sheets against one of Europe’s great clubs.
The English club has now a 50% chance to reach the Europa League Final in Baku. The last step will take them to Valencia, Spain for the semifinal stage. Valencia is great team but the Gunners are favorites to move on.
Coach Emery comments on the big away performance:
“I don’t know if it’s our best performance but it is good. After our victory in Watford, which was a difficult match, it was good to then repeat against Napoli in the second leg and keep our clean sheet, and also win this match against a very big team. I think the most important thing is to do our way and be consistent, because for our final objective we need to continue improving.
I am very proud of my players and proud of our work. Because here we showed the players can play against good players and show a big personality with our ideas. Maybe we wanted to take more possession with the ball and control the match with the ball a bit better, but we didn’t do everything I wanted. But our position in the first half was very good on the pitch, we pressed well and stopped their combinations. We pressed them a lot, and we were in their box a lot of times with the chance to score. Our objective was to score and now we must be consistent over the 90 minutes.
We played against the second team in the Italian league, with very good players, they play very well with their combinations, they played against Liverpool with a big performance and they went out of the Champions League even though they had the same points. This is a good result in two legs but we got the result because we respected them a lot. Our respect for them gave us a serious performance over two matches. But Napoli is a big team in Europe, a very big team.”
Coach Emery has a special relationship winning the trophy twice during his stand with Sevilla FC
“I grew up a lot in this competition, the Europa League, and I think it gives us a big opportunity when we can’t play in the Champions League. It’s a chance to do something important, this competition is important for us because it gives us a chance to play in the Champions League next year. Our domestic league has a lot of teams trying to get into the [top four], and the Europa League is for me and for us now very important. Today Napoli with their supporters showed us they wanted to do something big, and if we won it’s because we worked very well.”
