Barcelona (3) – (1) Arsenal
Arsenal lose 4-3 on aggregate
Busquets O.G. (’53)
Camp Nou, Barcelona

I’m not going to lie, I am absolutely gutted.

Arsenal were always going to be up against it against Barcelona at the Camp Nou so to have a referee as biased and incompetent as the one we had made the task even more impossible. He was a fucking disgrace.

The decisions he made were blatantly for the home side and Van Persie’s sending off was ridiculous. The refereeing was as bad as it was in the Champions League Final the last time we played Barcelona.

Don’t get me wrong, Barcelona were immense but to have key decisions go against you is basically finishing the game before it has even started.

And for all of Barcelona’s dominance, possession and beautiful football, the fact that Arsenal were unfairly reduced to ten men, and our goalkeeper was injured early on, the crazy thing was Arsenal could have gone through tonight.

The brilliant Jack Wilshere put in Bendtner who should have knocked out Barcelona, only to fluff his lines and miscontrol the ball badly.

And the diving and rolling around from the Barcelona players was disgraceful. Beautiful football maybe, but their players know how to con the referee, which wasn’t hard as he was shite anyway. They play great football but you can’t help feeling all of the Barcelona players are just a bunch of tossers, they really are. They’re gifted and they come across like a bunch of arrogant arseholes.

It was brave performance from the Arsenal team but fundamentally Arsene made some errors in his team selection. Tomas Rosicky seems to get the big games but just hasn’t had the form or performances to justify his selection. Arshavin would have been a better choice to start the match, as he was the only player in the squad (apart from Nasri and the injured Walcott) with any genuine pace.

And it’s hard to argue against the fact that Arsene Wenger can’t make decent substitutions. From the moment Robin van Persie lost his rag in the first half, it was clear that he was ticking time bomb that could blow up at any moment. Added to the fact that he was isolated and completely ineffective, replacing him with Arshavin or Bendtner before he was sent off made a lot of sense. Unfortunately Arsene didn’t make that call.

Finally we come to the captain. I touched on this after the first leg, Fabregas clearly either gets overwhelmed about playing Barcelona or he feels uncomfortable about playing against his mates. The ridiculous back heel summed up his contribution really. His performances have been below par in both legs and even when Arsenal equalised he hardly celebrated. Let’s get £40 million for him in the summer because Jack Wilshere is outperforming him this season on a consistent basis.