Arsenal were pitiful, even farcical against Bayern Munich and they got off easy at just 5-1

The score read 5-1 and it is auf wiedersehen [goodbye], Arsenal. Have the London club crossed from the realm of the puzzling into the netherworld of the burlesque and the absurd with a season-ending defeat that was both farcical and pitiful?

Eleven minutes – that is how long Arsenal’s resistance, in the form of a 4-3-3 formation, alternating with a 4-4-1-1 block, against German champions and Champions League nemesis Bayern Munich lasted. Arsenal defending deep was always bound to be a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure and doom, but, in the process, they even invented an umpteenth manner of capitulation.

Arjen Robben’s opening goal was freakish. Munich had teased Arsenal with a few early passes in behind the midfield duo of Granit Xhaka and Francis Coquelin, as the visitors, who pressed high, were quickly pinned back, defending around their own box, suffocating in a Bavarian stranglehold.

Bayern asphyxiated Arsenal

The bold and bald Dutch evergreen cut inside from the left – who could have guessed, the other Bayern players almost suppressed a yawn – and tip-toed trough Arsenal’s non-press. Francis Coquelin, inexplicably, switched off. He seemingly did not know that Robben favours his left-foot, and so Robben did what he tends to with so much time and space on the ball. With a delightful curve and millimetered precision, he posted the ball into top-left corner beyond the reach of Arsenal goalkeeper David Ospina.

From that moment on, Munich asphyxiated Arsenal. They were brilliant, intent on keeping the pitch very, very wide, at times playing a lateral chess game as both Robben and Douglas Costa, on the left channel, hugged the touchline. Arsenal, somehow, refused staunchly to pressure Munich’s wingers.

But for all the 71% ball possession, Bayern had just three attempts on target at the end of the first half – and Arsenal got level. Robert Lewandowski had shoved Laurent Koscielny down inside the box, with the brutality of a lumberjack and Alexis Sanchez, combining a miss with an airshot, little poise with an ice cold demeanour, scored at his third crack. The equaliser was an epiphany: Arsenal gelled. They were secure at the back and much improved, pestering Bayern on the counter with scoring opportunities for both Xhaka and Mesut Ozil, who would remain indifferent throughout.

In the 49th minute, the game’s complexion changed again as Arsenal’s captain, who had marshalled his rearguard respectably, hobbled off with an injury, clutching his hamstring. His departure preceded a massacre, with English blood gushing, around the Allianz Arena, now a cauldron of noise, cheering the onslaught and the corresponding demise of Arsenal. It was a horror movie in bad taste, but Munich were irrepressible.

Arsenal’s second half of horror

Where was Arsenal’s defence to stop a flurry of goals, with Lewandowski and Thiago Alcantara, twice, scoring inside the space of ten minutes ? For once Arsenal played like FC Barcelona, but for all the wrong reasons. Gabriel Paulista and Shkodran Mustafi were non-defenders in a rejigged back four. They were a centre of passivity. The timing, the positioning and the cohesiveness were all gone. Arsenal’s central defenders were petrified as Bayern toyed with their victims, with much casualness and finesse, reducing a Champions League knockout game to a glorified training session.

So much so for the growing army of detractors of Carlo Ancelotti’s “steer-less” Munich that, or so went the churlish accusation, were a poor replica of Jupp Heynckes’s 2013 Champions League winners or lacked the guile of the outfit in the Guardiolian era. This was a very slick Bayern Munich, the anti-thesis of a self-destructive and apathetic Arsenal.

All of Bayern’s goal were well executed and a testimony to their superiority, but they all were lubricated by defensive mistakes from Arsenal, ranging from the inept to the ridiculous. A Koscielny-sized hole gaped in Bavaria – Lewandowksi towered over Mustafi; Paulista failed to read the Polish striker’s audacious drag-back, arguably a fabulous one; Alcantara’s shot took a deflection and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain gave the ball away in diabolical fashion. Muller then “Mullered” Arsenal for a fifth goal.

The second half was Munich’s crisply orchestrated mini-version of the infamous Brazi Germany semi-final, but they left Arsenal with the dignity of a more gallant final score. That was the sole respite for the London club and Wenger, who must, after a night without any positives, contemplate a universe from which all substance and hope has been drained.