When we were drawn against Slavia Prague in this season’s Champions League, many Gooners’ minds would have turned the clocks back to October 2007 and Emirates Stadium’s first magical European night.
While it was the first-ever meeting between the teams, we had already recorded six wins out of six against Slavia’s city rivals Sparta. That included a 2-0 away win in October 2005 when Thierry Henry broke our all-time scoring record, and we started the 2007/08 campaign by beating them in both legs to qualify for the Champions League group stage.
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Having navigated that hurdle, our tournament began by defeating Sevilla 3-0 in N5, and then we pipped Steaua Bucharest 1-0 away from home before our matchday three visit from the team from the Czech capital, when the free-flowing, title-chasing Gunners were about to excel themselves in a marvellous exhibition of attacking football.
After just four minutes at an expectant Emirates Stadium, Cesc Fabregas curled home his shot from 15 yards, following some trickery from Alexandr Hleb on the touchline. Hleb then forced David Hubacek to net an own goal after 20 minutes, and five minutes before half-time Theo Walcott scored his first Champions League goal to put us 3-0 up following a dreadful fumble from the Slavia goalkeeper. It could have been more at the interval; Emmanuel Adebayor guided a header narrowly wide and a whipped Emmanuel Eboue cross-cum-shot whizzed just past the post.
There’s always a risk that with the home side cruising, the second half will be a damp squib, but Arsenal emerged with a thirst for more goals, and in a 10-minute blitz after the interval, we scored three more.
Slaloming into the box, Hleb, with his socks rolled down in customary style, slotted home his second of the night and Walcott’s blistering pace saw him tear past a static defence to make it 5-0. From a delicious interplay of passes with Adebayor and Walcott, Fabregas then notched his second and our sixth of the night after just 58 minutes.
That had the statisticians scurrying for their record books as we threatened a double-digit victory, but just one more goal would trouble the scorers, as in the dying minutes, young Danish striker Nicklas Bendtner bundled home the final goal of the night. However, it remains our biggest-ever Champions League win and the joint-largest in our European history, tied with our 7-0 Cup Winners' Cup drubbing of Standard Liege in 1993.
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The ’seventh heaven’ headlines were predictable enough, and Wenger was particularly praiseworthy of his team afterwards, especially 18-year-old Walcott. ‘I wanted Theo to start in a big game and he played well. He is calm and clinical in front of goal, and his use of space was excellent,’ he said.
Perhaps surprisingly following such a hefty victory which saw us reach the halfway mark of the group stage with a 100% record, we only finished runners-up in the group. Slavia shored up their defence sufficiently to register a 0-0 draw a fortnight later, and after losing to Sevilla 3-1 in Spain, a 2-1 win over Steaua wasn’t enough to overhaul the Spaniards.
We eventually fell at the quarter-final stage to Liverpool and finished third in the league despite losing just three times, but the 7-0 thrashing of Slavia remains one of the abiding memories of a goal-laden, wonderfully entertaining campaign.
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