Kai Havertz climbed off the bench to score a last-gasp equaliser against the club where he began his career to earn Arsenal a 1-1 draw at Bayer Leverkusen in the first leg of their Champions League last-16 tie.<\/p>\n
The Gunners, who had topped the league phase having won all eight games, were trailing to Robert Andrich’s goal \u2013 from a corner, of all things \u2013 with a minute of normal time remaining.<\/p>\n
But Havertz kept his nerve after fellow substitute Noni Madueke was brought down in the area to snatch a draw and leave Arsenal as favourites to reach a third-consecutive quarter-final.<\/p>\n
Andrich was arguably lucky to have still been on the pitch, earning a booking in the opening seconds for pulling down Viktor Gyokeres after the Sweden international had rolled him on the edge of the box.<\/p>\n
Moments later Andrich bodychecked Gyokeres near the touchline but escaped a second yellow from referee Halil Umut Meler.<\/p>\n
\n
Arsenal were missing the creative spark of injured captain Martin Odegaard and it showed, especially around the edge of the Leverkusen penalty area.<\/p>\n
But they almost took a 20th-minute lead with a lovely move when Eberechi Eze let the ball run across him.<\/p>\n
Gyokeres laid it off to Gabriel Martinelli, who took a touch before crashing his left-footed shot against the crossbar.<\/p>\n
The Gunners had another chance moments later when Piero Hincapie, who is still on loan from Leverkusen, shot straight at home goalkeeper Janis Blaswich.<\/p>\n
Leverkusen’s chief threat was Cameroon forward Christian Kofane, who tested David Raya with an early effort from long range.<\/p>\n
The teenager then threatened to race through on goal after robbing an uncharacteristically shaky Gabriel Magalhaes, only to be thwarted by the irrepressible Declan Rice.<\/p>\n
Gunners centre-half Gabriel had to take one on the chin, literally, when he blocked a fierce drive from former Liverpool defender Jarell Quansah to ensure the first half ended goalless.<\/p>\n
But after the restart Arsenal were caught cold straight from the kick-off, first when Martin Terrier header\u2019s had to be spectacularly tipped over by Raya.<\/p>\n
From the corner, Andrich gave Eze the slip at the far post to head the hosts in front.<\/p>\n
It was a taste of their own medicine for an Arsenal side so proficient from corners this term and was the first time they had fallen behind in the competition this season.<\/p>\n
Boss Mikel Arteta responded by sending on Madueke for Bukayo Saka \u2013 who looked off the pace \u2013 and then replaced Gyokeres with Havertz.<\/p>\n
The equaliser came when Madueke got past Malik Tillman into the area and was tripped by the defender.<\/p>\n
Havertz coolly converted the spot-kick to deny his old club a famous win and leave quadruple-chasing Arsenal in decent shape ahead of next week\u2019s home leg.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kai Havertz climbed off the bench to score a last-gasp equaliser against the club where he began his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":341618,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-341617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341617"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341617\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/341618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}