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As I said during the week I’d already made my peace with our European exit after the first leg, but when you’re winning 2-0 with 13 minutes plus injury time to go you can’t not hope and/or believe just a little bit.

In the end the 3-0 win proved a step too far, as most of us feared when that late goal went in at the Emirates a few weeks back. Last night’s performance and win was excellent, but in the overall context of the game it wasn’t enough to see us through.

The manager picked a very attacking line-up with Danny Welbeck replacing Aaron Ramsey from the weekend win over West Ham. At first it looked a choice that had caused us some imbalance as the home side were well in the game in the opening stages but, slowly but surely, we got on top and stayed on top until the final whistle.

I thought the England man was very good in the first half, involved in Olivier Giroud’s 36th minute opener and desperately unlucky not to be on the scoresheet himself a couple of minutes later when his goal-bound shot was deflected wide by the legs of a prostrate Monaco defender.

Until the goal it felt like things might not go our way. Giroud headed just wide, Koscielny hit the bar but was wrongly given offside so that saved us some frustration, but once the first goal went in we kept up the pressure right until the end of the first period and throughout the second.

It was telling that in the second half, even when our de facto ball winner Francis Coquelin had been taken off for the more attacking Aaron Ramsey, we were nicking the ball back of them constantly on the rare occasions they had it. At the time I thought Coquelin was a bit unlucky to come off and under normal circumstances you might have considered hooking Alexis, who struggled again, but it was a night when we needed goals and had to take some risks.

Ramsey’s introduction, followed shortly afterwards by that of Theo Walcott, helped pin them back further. When Ozil found Monreal his cut-back was side-footed off the post by Walcott, but Ramsey’s unerring finish into the bottom corner made it 2-0 on the night and put us within a single goal of a remarkable comeback.

It probably should have come in the 83rd minute when Cazorla’s floated free found it’s way to the back post where Giroud and Alexis kinda got in each others way and the keeper flapped the ball away desperately from off the line. Initially I thought it might have gone behind but the lack of significant appeal from an Arsenal player is probably a sign it didn’t.

After that we resorted to crosses which were meat and drink for the Monaco defence against an attack which isn’t exactly the tallest and most physical. They crowded us into narrow spaces and I was desperately looking for someone to provide us with some width but it didn’t happen. I saw Ozil criticised post-game, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, on a night when we kept them under such pressure by keeping the ball, he was well and truly involved in almost everything we did, cropping up all over the pitch to keep the ball moving.

Ultimately, while a great performance on the night, the goal we desperately needed wouldn’t come and our departure from the Champions League was sealed after 5 minutes of injury time. It’s impossible not to look back on this tie as a whole and have huge regrets. I don’t think there can be any real anger about what we did last night or how we played. We went there, played extremely well and dominated the game, but the first leg proved to be our downfall.

It’s something the players are aware of, as Aaron Ramsey said afterwards:

We have to learn to keep ourselves in the game in the first leg. We need to be a lot more wise in the first game then go to places like this and win.

Laurent Koscielny agreed, saying:

We say same thing every year. Our first game is catastrophic. We have to put it right and play well in two games.

While I thought this was interesting from Arsene Wenger:

Wenger on Bein Sports: 'Monaco were very fortunate over the two legs. We could've got 4 or 5 tonight. We have to be more clinical' #AFC

— Matt Spiro (@mattspiro) March 17, 2015

The focus will be on that late goal we conceded and that was a decisive moment in the course of the two games, no question about it, but that the manager’s focus is on how we failed to finish says a lot about the way he views the failure to get through against opposition we really should have beaten.

While I think late on in the second half last night, when we were chucking crosses and diagonals into their box, we could see how their defensive organisation made that easy for them to deal with, over the course of the two legs we made a lot of chances and didn’t score enough goals.

I think he’s right to expect more from his forwards. Olivier Giroud made some amends for that first leg with his first half goal and a hard-working display, but the game at the Emirates will haunt him, no question about it. Nevertheless, those misses were made even more frustrating by the team’s collective blunder for the injury-time goal they scored. Without it, last night’s result would have been enough to see us through.

It seems churlish to pin it on individuals this morning because in almost any game you can come back to a moment, or moments, when somebody didn’t do something, but in the end it’s a team game, and it was the team that let itself down this season.

In previous European campaigns we can talk about a bit of bad luck in certain games which made playing against the likes of Bayern Munich or Barcelona – the best teams in Europe by some distance – more challenging. This time around, it was a Monaco side who are decent but not much more than that. We should have gone through, and we have to look at why.

There’s talk of not being able to cope with the pressure in the first leg but I think, more than anything, we just had a terrible night at exactly the wrong time and gave ourselves too much to do. If you look at our recent form since the Southampton defeat it’s: WWWWWLWWWLWWWWW

The defeats to Sp*rs away and at home to Monaco stand out. I don’t think it’s really down to pressure, because we’ve won games this season and coped with it well, but sometimes certain failings can become a habit. Real Madrid, for example, went out of the Champions League for 6 consecutive seasons at the Round of 16 stage between 2004 and 2010 and this is a club that has won the competition more than anyone, and were in possession of some of the best players in the world.

The task for this club now though is to get back into this competition and do better. I don’t think we’re a club that people realistically expect to win the Champions League but with the recent investment on the pitch on players who should be taking us to the next level, this season’s European campaign has been particularly disappointing.

If there are positives to be taken from last night it’s that another win continues the momentum we have as the league season enters its final stages. That’s five wins in a row now, it’s 20 wins from our last 25 games, so there’s definitely something positive happening in that regard. The challenge for us now is to overcome these blips which continue to cause such angst and frustration.

We’re like a long-distance runner who trips himself up every couple of laps and has to work harder than he should to get back to the front of the race which is always just out of reach. Whether that habit is psychological, managerial, an issue of overall quality, moments of unfortunate and costly circumstance or a combination of all of those things is why there’s such debate every time something goes wrong – and despite last night this was a tie that went wrong for Arsenal.

All we can do is put this into the big, well-worn cupboard marked ‘Lessons we have to learn’ and get on with what we have to domestically. There’s still plenty to play for in the league and we can make progress there if we play well enough. And, of course, there’s the FA Cup which provides the chance of a trophy this season.

But, should we qualify for next season’s Champions League, the manager really has to consider how to get his team further because making progress in that competition will surely beneficial to what we have to do in others too.

Right, that’s that. More tomorrow with an Arsecast and all that. Until then.