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Ed Aarons
Kai Havertz has said the knee injury that forced him to miss the first half of the season was the most painful experience of his life but that it has given him “new hunger” to win trophies with Arsenal.
The Germany forward missed more than 20 games after having surgery on the injury he picked up on the opening day of the season in the victory over Manchester United at Old Trafford.
Havertz, who will face his former club Bayer Leverkusen for the first time since leaving for Chelsea in 2020 in the first leg of the Champions League last-16 tie on Wednesday, was also absent for a significant portion of last season because of a hamstring problem.
The 26-year-old’s return has been managed carefully by Mikel Arteta in recent weeks but Havertz is confident that his fitness difficulties are behind him after a testing 12 months. “For me it was just tough because I never felt that pain before in my life and it just came randomly,” he said.
Team news
Arsenal’s XI is as expected. There’s one change from their last Premier League game, a 1-0 win at Brighton a week ago. The fit-again William Saliba replaces Cristhian Mosquera in defence. Kai Havertz is on the bench against his old club.
Leverkusen’s side includes the England international Jarell Quansah. They make one change from the 3-3 draw with Freiburg at the weekend: Exequiel Palacios comes into the midfield in place of Equi Fernandez.
Bayer Leverkusen (3-4-2-1) Blaswich; Quansah, Andrich, Tapsoba; Poku, Palacios, Garcia, Grimaldo; Terriera, Maza; Kofane.
Subs: Omlin, Lomb, Fernandez, Hofmann, Tilmann, Schick, Oermann, Tape, Culbreath.
Arsenal (4-3-3) Raya; Timber, Saliba, Gabriel, Hincapie; Eze, Zubimendi, Rice; Saka, Gyokeres, Martinelli.
Subs: Arrizabalaga, Ranson, Mosquera, White, Jesus, Norgaard, Madueke, Havertz, Calafiori, Lewis-Skelly, Dowman, Salmon.
Referee Umut Meler (Turkey).
Barney Ronay
Cruyff’s Ajax, Messi’s Barcelona, Rice’s Arsenal. Stein, Michels, Ferguson, Arteta. The Dark Side of the Moon, The Very Best of The Beatles, Arsenal 2025-26 highlights DVD. Total Football, tiki-taka, hugging the goalie at corners. Get ready. Make room among the greats. It may just be coming.
And yes, you can laugh at this on the internet. You can pull-quote excerpts with mocking emojis. Throw in some Niles from Frasier has really lost it stuff. You can point, with justification, to the fact these other people, the actual greats, did it for a long time, not just one year.
But the fact is we are now very close to a reckoning up. And should this happen, it will be impossible on the basic numbers to exclude the current Arsenal team from a list of the greatest to have played the game.
The head-to-head
These teams have met only twice, both times during the second group stage of the 2001-02 Champions League. A swaggering Arsenal side battered Leverkusen 4-1 at home, then conceded a very late equaliser in a 1-1 draw in Germany.
It proved crucial: Leverkusen ultimately went through and reached the final; Arsenal, imperious domestically, failed to reach the knockout stage.
Preamble
Hello and welcome to live, minute-by-minute coverage of the first leg of the Champions League clash between Bayer Leverkusen and Arsenal in Germany. Arsenal, runawayish leaders in the Premier League, are strong favourites to reach their third consecutive Champions League quarter-final. That’s happened only once before, between 2007-08 and 2009-10, and would be another marker of their undeniable progress under Mikel Arteta.
While Arsenal topped the league stage with a perfect record of eight wins from eight, Leverkusen finished 16th and had to go into the playoffs. They won that pretty comfortably, beating Olympiacos 2-0 on aggregate, but they are a long way from the glories of two seasons ago. Tonight is a chance to hit the heights again.
Kick off 5.45pm GMT.
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