Not the most eventful night, but one in which both sets of fans should have gone home reasonably happy. Arsenal are group winners with a pressure-free game at home against BATE to blood their players with, and Cologne still have a chance of going through thanks to a hard-fought 1-0 win which their fans will remember for a long time combined with after Red Star Belgrade’s draw with Bate Borisov.
The Gunners went close early on, as Jack Wilshere’s neat pass found its way to Welbeck and then Maitland-Niles, who saw his effort deflected out for a corner that was taken rather easily by Timo Werner.
The next significant action would home at the hands of Cologne, with Jhon Córdoba managing to find a long pass and fire a shot across the goal of David Ospina, forcing the Colombian into the first decent save of the night. Timo Horn nearly had to do the same with a fine hit from Francis Coquelin, who drove his shot just wide from 25 yards.
Not a lot was happening between sporadic ventures forward from either side, with Arsenal avoiding another injury as it turned out that Mathieu Debuchy was fine when he went down awkwardly and the next person to force Horn into a save would once again be Francis Coquelin, who burst into the area to get onto the end of a scooped Giroud pass, putting a rasping shop onto the base of the post.
Cologne would lose Dominic Maroh to what appeared to be a tweaked hamstring, being replaced by Konstantin Rausch, but the first half passed without a great deal of incident.
#COLvAFC
So did the 15 minutes after the interval, until Vladislav Bezborodov gave a penalty that Arsenal fans may well have called a tangle of legs, although the home crowd did not care a jot when it was awarded, nor when Gurasssy lashed it down the middle to give a side that has had little to cheer something to celebrate with just over an hour gone.
This appeared to spark Arsenal into life. Chambers lifts a wonderful cross into the box that Klunter put out for a corner before Giroud was able to get a touch away. Elneny turned it in towards Iwobi - and Horn got the punch to clear. Then Wilshere fired a neat effort that once again forced Horn into action.
Olivier Giroud was once again denied from scoring a crucial equaliser when Jorge Meré managed to get in front of Debuchy’s brilliant cross to prevent him from coming very close to equalising and then Wilshere sent the Frenchman into the box although he would be sandwiched by Timo and Horn, the latter needing some treatment.
Olkowski claimed that an attempted cross into the Arsenal box was knocked down by the hand of Mertesacker, but the referee was not convinced, and the ball returned to the men in blue whom had coordinated possession all night, if not making the quality of chances that gave them a real shot at the game.
Two of them would come in the final ten minutes, Horn managing to bat away Reiss Nelson’s five-yard toe poke and then Jack Wilshere’s effort that came soon afterwards. That was not to be the last of the danger, but it was to be the closest Arsenal would come to taking a point on a night that worked well for them, in the end.
