(Football news) The Gunners have already accumulated nine points from their first four games, giving them an unstoppable lead at the top of the rankings. They now need just one more point to guarantee a top-two finish.
In addition, a win in North London would allow Mikel Arteta’s team to finish first in the division with one game remaining, while their Ligue 1 opponents are now in third position with five points.
Arsenal might very well be going into Wednesday’s match with a confirmed ball in the pot for the last-16 draw if they hadn’t lost at the Stade Bollaert-Delelis in early October, as Gabriel Jesus’s first goal against Lens turned out to be in vain.
In fact, the Gunners’ first Champions League defeat in more than six years and only their second in five prior encounters with Lens came after a superb equalizer by Adrien Thomasson in the first half and a first-time goal by Elye Wahi in the second half.
Meetings between the two teams have been surprisingly few, given Les Merlus’ lack of European nous in the twenty-first century. October’s setback represented Arsenal and Lens’ reunion, twenty-three years after the clubs had faced off in the 1999–2000 UEFA Cup semi-finals.
That year, Arsene Wenger’s team proved to be too strong for the Ligue 1 heavyweights on both occasions. Dennis Bergkamp opened the scoring in the first leg of the Gunners’ 1-0 victory at Highbury after just two minutes, and Thierry Henry and Nwankwo Kanu helped the team win 2-1 on the other side of the English Channel. However, Arsenal would later suffer heartbreak in the final against Galatasaray.
In the European football league’s second division, Arsenal’s two-leg rout of Lens was payback for the first-ever competitive meeting between the two teams in the group stages of the 1998–1999 Champions League, where the French team came out on top both times.
A little over two months later, in late November 1998, Arsenal lost 1-0 in London as Ray Parlour was fired after the clubs’ first meeting took place at the Stade Bollaert-Delelis, where Marc Overmars’s opening goal was cancelled out by an injury time equalizer from former France international Tony Vairelles.
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