The timing couldn’t exactly have been worse for Alexis Sanchez.
With his teammates playing out the final minutes of their second 5-1 defeat to Bayern Munich in three weeks, one of the cameras zoomed in on the Arsenal substitutes bench.
There was the Chilean, in the same week in which newspaper reports had told of how he had stormed out of a training session, clearly grinning while exchanging a few words with Petr Cech.
Obviously, you wouldn’t expect too many people connected with Arsenal to be wearing smiles on their faces at this particular moment in time – certainly not one of the the club’s highest-earning employees, that’s for sure. Because of this, plenty of those that saw it instantly jumped to conclusions: Sanchez was a disgrace; he couldn’t wait to get out of the club; he’d completely disrespected the Arsenal supporters… that sort of thing.
Now though, Cech has jumped to the defence of his teammate. Asked about the incident, the goalkeeper stressed that Sanchez had been left extremely disappointed by the way in which the game against Bayern had gone and insisted that, if anything, his smile had been a rueful one, reflecting the sense of injustice that he felt about the scoreline.
“It is sad and he was as sad as I have seen him,” Cech is quoted as saying in The Mirror. “And unfortunately when you say the sentence, ‘had we scored the second goal everything could look different’ and then you do ‘ooh’ you know.
“But obviously you can take the picture and you can interpret it the way you want unfortunately. But we the players we know exactly what he said and we know how he was hurting and he was as disappointed as anybody else. It is unfortunate and disappointing.”
Arsenal followed up their Champions League departure by winning 5-0 against non-league Lincoln in the FA Cup quarter final.
