Wenger: “Barcelona are 95% qualified to the next round”

Lionel Messi insists Barcelona still have work to do to progress to the quarter-finals of the Champions League despite their 2-0 victory over Arsenal at the Emirates Stadium.

Arsenal had done well to largely negate the threat of Messi, as well as his attacking partners Luis Suarez and Neymar, for most of the opening 70 minutes before the Argentinian struck twice.

“We have never done that this season, particularly when we have lost a game we have tried to bounce back quickly”.

“It was a great performance from us, we got a good result against a very good team with really good players”, he said.

“I felt that we lost at the moment that we looked more capable of winning the game, and we also lost it in a way which we could not afford to give them”. “It was similar to Monaco”. We are Arsenal football club and we won’t go there and have absolutely no chance. “Barcelona is through at 95 percent certainly, but we want to go there and play”. She was the bronze medallist at the 2004 Summer Olympics. I felt in the final third we missed something. “It is all of us”, said Bayern winger Arjen Robben, who had netted in the 55th minute to give the visitors a two-goal cushion.

The first leg between the two kicked off with the home team playing a hugely disciplined game to keep Barcelona at bay. The first was from Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain midway through the first-half, when he ought to have done better after the ball broke to him inside the area, and the second was a header from Olivier Giroud on the hour that worked Marc-André ter Stegen.

“We played excellently against a fantastic team”.

“At the Nou Camp we’ll go out to win, as we do at every ground”.

First they were undone by a classic Neymar-Suarez-Messi counter-attack and then substitute Mathieu Flamini rashly conceded a penalty 47 seconds after coming on, leaving a frustrated Wenger to accuse his players of naivety. Obviously, we needed to score at one point, then we could have put pressure on them and they would have to come at us. “It was a very fast break which is how we like to play – with open space – and luckily we were able to do that”, Messi, the man of the match, told UEFA.com.

In the other Champions League game on Tuesday night, Juventus fought back from 2-0 down to claim a 2-2 draw with Pep Guardiola’s Bayern Munich in Turin.