On their first visit to a place where a shake of the head means yes, perhaps Arsenal can be forgiven the outbreak of confusion which produced a most unexpected European nail-biter.
Arsene Wenger's team found themselves two down inside a quarter of an hour on a bitterly cold night in the Bulgarian capital against a team they beat 6-0 just weeks earlier. Football, eh?
Without his first-choice full-backs, Wenger watched a defensive chaos engulf his team, the sort he must have dared to think had been eradicated by some solid summer signings.
It sounded a warning that such deficiencies still lurk. Fortunately for the Frenchman, his team remain ever potent and imaginative in attack and Ludogorets proved again to have their own inherent problems at the back.
Granit Xhaka and Olivier Giroud had them level by half time and just as they seemed set to drop two precious points, Mesut Ozil delivered one of the most delectable goals you are likely to ever see.
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The game was in its 87th minute when Ozil was released by Mohamed Elneny and delicately lobbed the ball over the goalkeeper, collected it on the other side of him and dummied and shimmied his way past two defenders before he gently caressed it into an empty net.
'Great players make the right decision in the game situations they face, they take the optimum solution,' smiled Wenger, before confessing he feared the German had blown the opportunity.
'To me, it didn't look like the optimum solution. You wanted him to take the chance earlier. But he had enough skill to prove he was right. When the ball was in the back of the net, it was clear it had been the optimum solution.'
Victory clinches a place in the last 16 for Arsenal for the 17th successive year.
-DailyMail
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