There are a lot of reasons why some fans are not enamoured by our captain Gallas, however if there is one thing we can all agree he is good at is his propensity to come up with the most important goals. On the 88th minute in last night game, a Gallas goal made the difference between another sad loss in Kiev and an acceptable point gained.

Gallas scores his 3rd goal in 3 Champions League games

It was a game which Wenger entered cautiously, and paid for this caution. Sometimes I feel we give too much respect to these teams, we need to go out there and show how good we are and put the opposition on the back foot.

Which is what we did in the opening 30 minutes, were it not for the return of our profligacy in front of goal we would have been a goal or two up in that 30 minutes. We quieted the crowd, we created chances, we stifled Kiev, what we did not do was score and did we pay for that.

An extremely soft penalty gave the home side the impetus, because contrary to popular belief before the penalty Kiev had hardly created anything, a couple long range attempts and one shot that ricochetted kindly for Almunia. Once they scored, in our attempts to equalise Kiev found a lot of space to hit us on the counter.

We were eventually rewarded for our endeavour and low cross from Walcott got a touch from Adebayor towards the goal, which Gallas got to before the keeper for the equalising goal. A goal which we thoroughly deserved.

It was not a great performance, but it was enough that we should win. Arsene commented with accuracy

“The game is a mixture of frustration and relief. The game should be over at half-time because we had clear chances in the first half, but it is a relief because with three minutes to go we were 1-0 down. I felt our level dropped in the second half and we did not create as many chances as we would have liked to. We feel we have lost two points today.”

Gallas post match interview showed what I like about him. He has a burning desire to win and sometimes that gets the better of him, that desire however, has gotten us out of trouble more often than not.