\n<\/p>\n
Arsenal were forced to settle for a hard-fought 1-1 draw in the first leg of their Champions League semi-final with Atletico Madrid on Wednesday, but they will feel aggrieved to have been denied a late penalty that could have won it after Viktor Gyokeres and Julian Alvarez had already traded spot-kicks either side of half-time.<\/p>\n
The visitors controlled a cagey first period, which culminated in Gyokeres blasting home after he was clumsily bundled over in the area by David Hancko. David Raya had been forced into a good save from a fine Alvarez strike and Noni Madueke went close at the other end with a curling effort, but otherwise it was a half of few chances.<\/span><\/p>\n However, it was a different story after the break as Arsenal relinquished that control and found themselves clinging on at times. Alvarez levelled with a penalty of his own 10 minutes into the second 45 after Ben White was punished for a handball. That preceded a flurry of close calls for the Gunners, most notably Raya’s close-range stop from Ademola Lookman, Gabriel Magalhaes’ incredible block to deny Antoine Griezmann and the Frenchman hitting the woodwork.<\/span><\/p>\n Arsenal thought they had the third spot-kick of the night and a chance to win the game with just 10 minutes to play, as substitute Eberechi Eze went down under another Hancko challenge – but the referee controversially reversed his decision after consulting the pitch-side monitor. Their frustration was almost compounded in added time, but thankfully Nahuel Molina’s drive flew just over as the Gunners were made to settle for a creditable first-leg draw.<\/span><\/p>\n GOAL<\/strong><\/b> rates Arsenal’s players from the Metropolitano…<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Arsenal were forced to settle for a hard-fought 1-1 draw in the first leg of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2560,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2559\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}