Petr Cech still confident Arsenal can qualify despite Munich hammering

The Bavarians struck three times in the first half through Robert Lewandowski, Thomas Mueller and David Alaba to avenge their 2-0 loss in London last month – their only defeat this season – and underline their title aspirations.

Arjen Robben scored just 38 seconds after coming on as a substitute to make it 4-0, but Arsenal got one back with 20 minutes remaining through Olivier Giroud’s superb finish before Muller added a fifth late on.

Now they’re in a precarious position once again, as Bayern bit back with a 5-1 mauling at the Allianz Arena to leave the Gunners needing to win both of their last two games to have any chance of qualification.

“There is still a chance to qualify, Olympiacos have to lose here, we have to beat Zagreb and then beat Olympiacos in Olympiacos, there is a small chance but it is a real one”.

“You have to give credit to Bayern for their quality, but we made things easy for them”, said the Frenchman.

They are maybe the best team in Europe but if we’d had our usual defensive performance we could have repeated our performance from the first two games.

“We were extremely poor defensively and were not at the races”, he conceded. “We have to give it our all to have a chance to qualify”, Wenger was quoted as saying by the Guardian.

The manager said Laurent Koscielny had an 80 % chance of returning for Sunday’s derby at home to Tottenham Hotspur, after missing the 5-1 Champions League defeat at Bayern Munich in midweek because of a hip problem.

Wenger faces a Spurs team on Sunday fresh from a 2-1 win over Anderlecht in the Europa League last night and undefeated since losing to Manchester United on the opening weekend of the season. After we moved into the new stadium we had less financial resources than them because we had to pay our debts back.

Bayern were ahead on nine minutes through Lewandowski, who beat Arsenal’s offside trap to head home Thiago Alcantara’s cross into the bottom right corner from eight yards. If you look at the two games we played against them, in this game we had more chances than in the first game but they were much more efficient in terms of their strikers. We want to be in the fight and will do absolutely everything to do it. With five or six games to go then maybe.

“They have the same points as us so you can be sure we are going to try”. “We faced Bayern at its best”, said Cech.