What happened to Arsenal?

Arsenal saw their Champions league season come to and end again a team that was lead by a player that has hit a new level in talent in Lionel Messi.

Before I begin my little article on the game I have to comment on how outright amazing Mr. Messi is. What aspect I love about football is you dont have to be the biggest or the strongest, all you need is good balance and a good center of gravity and you'll be fine. Lionel Messi has those characteristics and obviously more but thats another story. Messi is almost impossible to knock off the ball and if your lucky to do so hes so quick that he'll jump right back on the loose ball most of the time. His ability to run around players is astounding, I mean hes not even flashy like his Madrid counter part Christiano Ronaldo. Messi simply with a soft touch to the inside or outside and hes gone. Worse thing is for defenders is we all know what hes going to do, like I said hes not flashy its just he his strength on the ball, quickness and low center of gravity it makes it very very difficult to stop him without fouling him. His accuracy is again almost perfect, so if he has any sort of time in front of net he will most likely score like he showed against Arsenal. Just an amazing player.

Now to the game....

Talking with a team mate yesterday and we were talking about how we thought Arsenal pretty much was the Barcelona of the English Premier League. I dont mean as good or any better I mean the style of play. Both teams the pass and move philosophy instead of the crappy kick and run. So when I saw this match up I really thought Arsenal matched well with Barcelona. Unfortunately you can see no one and I mean no one can match Barcelona's style of play. The pressure Barcelona put on Arsenal was amazing and turned Arsenal from a passing team into a long ball team but what made this worse for Arsenal was they had 3 skilled attacking players injured. Not having Van Persie, Fabregas and Arshavin in the line up is a huge blow and Im sorry but Bendtner is not a world class player . Good on the lad for being where he is and scoring as much as he does but he does not exactly strike fear to defenses across Europe. Going from Dennis Bergkamp, Thierry Henry and Emmanuel Adebayor to all of a sudden having Nicklas Bendtner is odd for me. I understand Nicklas is still only 22 and has a lot of time to grow into a world class striker I would just assumed with Arsene Wengers ability to find these amazing young talent could of found someone alittle more skilled in the forward position but again Nicklas is still only 22, I guess time will tell. Anyways a little off track back to the game. You could see Arsenal was playing a bit tentative and was not there usual selves obviously they had injury problems but a team like Arsenals ability should not be playing nervous. You can see this when Arsenal scored, Theo Walcott had a clear break at goal and instead of shooting which he should of done but instead he passed it off. Now why would a player whos attacking minded pass off a ball when he had a better chance of scoring then Bendtner? To make his nervousness more obvious Walcotts pass was so poor he is lucky the defender over ran the play and Bendtner had the awareness to get up after the rebound and slot it home. Once Arsenal scored it made them even more nervous because they had a lead to protect and away from home. This is when Messi decided to tear apart Arsenals backline and make they look like a buch of u18 school boys. After that first goal by Messi we all know what happened next.