Arteta’s side are 16 games from the quadruple, helped by the forward’s devastating strike in this last-16 second leg
And now I am become Springtime Eze, destroyer of netting. At what point does a shot at goal become a health and safety violation? There were 36 minutes gone at the Emirates Stadium when Eberechi Eze did the thing.
How to describe the physical movements that generated Arsenal’s opening goal in this 2-0 defeat of Bayer Leverkusen? The shotgun pirouette. The swivel‑batter. The cage‑ball roundhouse. It was also a pianoforte kind of goal, the power in the finish preceded by a lovely, gentle bit of interplay from Declan Rice and Martín Zubimendi.
From there the ball was fed to Eze in enough space to nudge it gently with his left foot, let it bounce, rotate towards the target, then reach up and strike the ball at the top of the bounce with sudden and startling power. The contact was thrillingly sweet, right in the hard part, the top of the foot, following through the ball and sending it back towards the near corner. Even in that microsecond, the ball seemed to be moving too fast, an error in frame-speed, before zinging perfectly into the top corner. The net seemed to groan, yanked up on its strings like a tent being blown away in a storm. There was a delayed bark of outrage from the crowd, then a rolling roar as Arsenal players leapt about, eyes boggling.
