Xavi: Barcelona Were Superior To Arsenal

Arsenal put in a strong defensive performance in the opening 45 minutes of Tuesday’s Champions League tie against Barcelona, but Argentina international Lionel Messi broke the deadlock for the Catalans on the stroke of half-time to set the Blaugrana on the way to an eventual 3-1 victory to progress to the quarter-finals.

Barcelona midfielder Xavi, who restored his side’s lead in the 69th minute, wasn’t too impressed with Arsenal’s performance and pointed out that the Gunners only thought about defending.

“This is a fair result. We were the superior team both in the away game and at home. There’s justice in football,” Xavi was quoted as saying on the official Barcelona website.

“They had clearly come here to defend. They didn’t even have one single shot on goal. I expected a lot more from them to be honest.

“Javier Mascherano and Sergio Busquets are simply amazing for the team, while Leo Messi once again stepped up to make the difference.”

Despite trailing 2-1 from the first leg, Barca dominated the game from start to finish, and could arguably have scored many more goals to put the tie to bed long before their eventual 4-3 aggregate success was achieved. Xavi explains that only their finishing let them down.

“The only thing that could have been better was our finishing. We should have scored more and we suffered too much. We could have killed the game a lot sooner.

“Arsenal really didn’t want to play football. All they cared about was defending. The red card did affect the game, but the decision was right in my opinion.”