Every home game, Martin Odegaard gives you his thoughts on the goings-on around the club in his captain’s notes for the matchday programme.
Ahead of tonight’s crunch Champions League game against Porto, the skipper discussed our win at Brentford, what went wrong in the first leg and the best team spirit he’s seen in his career.
Ever since the final whistle went on Saturday, we have been preparing ourselves for tonight’s game. It was great to keep our momentum going with our win over Brentford at the weekend, and of course getting a late goal always gives you a little extra edge as well. We worked so hard throughout the game to score the winner, and I think we absolutely deserved it when it came.The spirit here around the whole club is just unbelievable. It’s the best I’ve ever seen in my life as part of a team. We have something special for sure, and that’s showing on the pitch too, how much we enjoy playing together. You see more and more how we understand each other on the pitch, how we move in relation to each other, and that’s so important.We are on a great run in the league – eight wins in a row – which is why it is difficult to explain why our performance away to Porto in the first leg was so different to what we have been doing in the league lately.
The main difference was our intention when we had the ball. We didn’t threaten enough, we didn’t play forward enough. We were trying to play around them rather than through them. That’s one of the things we’ve done so well lately in the Premier League, playing the ball between the lines, and getting our players in dangerous positions. We’ve been really good in our movement, working for each other to open the spaces, but we weren’t able to do that in Porto.
I don’t know what that was, but that’s football sometimes and you also have to give credit to Porto too. To be fair they did well to stop us too. They took the speed out of the game and made it tough for us to play, but that’s something you have to deal with, especially in European football. We have to be able to win in any context, that’s something we’ve spoken about before, and it’s something we’ll have to improve if we want to go all the way in Europe.
It’s been a long time since we have had a Champions League knockout game here at Emirates Stadium, but to be honest, I don’t think that changes anything in our mindset or approach. We go into every game wanting to win anyway, and that’s the same tonight of course, because we know nothing else is good enough. Maybe it can be a factor more in the first leg, thinking that there is another game and you need to be smart, weighing up the risk and reward part of it. But in the second leg, it’s just about the result. Like we always do at the Emirates, we go out there for the win, so nothing’s changed for us.
