With 10 minutes of Thursday’s Europa League semi-final first leg to play, it appeared as though we’d go into next week’s return match with a slender 1-0 advantage.
But then Antoine Griezmann scored a vital away goal, meaning we’ll require one of our own in Madrid next week if we are to reach the final.
After the match, Granit Xhaka looked back at what went right and what went wrong at Emirates Stadium.
on the game…
I think we played a great match… Atletico had one shot on our goal and scored. It’s unbelievable because we didn’t want that today, we wanted to have a good result at home. But it’s 1-1 and now we must focus on next week.
on if the team became tired at the end…
No, I don’t think so. We had a lot of chances. We were a bit unlucky with the amazing match of the goalkeeper of Atletico. A 1-1 draw isn’t the result we wanted but nothing is finished.
on how we’ll approach the return game…
We know we must score one goal. We must play like we did today, we must focus over 90 minutes, because you can see it’s always dangerous against Atletico.
on the result being hard to explain…
I’m not one who has an explanation for it now. Just after the game it’s very disappointing. I think today we were clearly the dominant side over the 90 minutes. We made chances and I think other teams would have struggled to make as many as we did against Atletico. Unfortunately we couldn’t get the result - a 1-0 would have been enough - but we conceded a silly goal and now we have to go to Madrid and play exactly as we did today… if you look at the game today, you can see that we can compete against Atletico. OK, we had a man more, but we created chances even before the red card. We just need to approach the game in the same way, try to score and then win the game.
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