Arsenal's Sokratis: 'We respect Chelsea but we are not afraid'

During his first interview as an Arsenal player last summer, it was put to Sokratis Papastathopoulos that his former Borussia Dortmund manager Thomas Tuchel had once described the 30-year-old Greek centre-back as being “obsessed” with defending. “I like that my team doesn’t concede goals,” he said. “I like the zero in defence, of course.” While Sokratis has not enjoyed as many zeros as he might have hoped for this season – playing alongside Shkodran Mustafi is not always conducive to clean sheets – his passion for defending was never more apparent than when Arsenal cantered to Premier League victory over Chelsea at the Emirates in January. With Willian in the Arsenal penalty area, looking to pick out a teammate with a pull-back, Sokratis dived in, dispossessed the winger with a perfectly timed challenge and rose to his feet with a roar of triumph soundtracking his aggressive celebratory fist-pump.

“I remember it was a good game from us,” he recalls upon being reminded of the incident, as he took time out from preparing for next week’s rematch in the Europa League final. “We were much better than them. Chelsea has a good team. Very good players. We respect them. We are not afraid. It’s one game. One final. We like to be there. We like to win. We want to play next year in the Champions League.”

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In a career that has taken him from his native Greece, to Italy, Germany and more recently England, Sokratis has played under such high achievers as Tuchel, Massimiliano Allegri, Jürgen Klopp and Unai Emery, winning a Greek championship that was later taken away from AEK Athens, one Serie A title, a German Cup and two German Super Cups along the way. On the eve of a game he describes as “maybe the biggest” of his career, he is happy to admit that, in terms of his own personal development as a player, his current boss has been the pick of the bunch.

“He’s the best coach I had in my career,” he says. “That’s because I have improved a lot under him. I play faster than one, two or three years ago. I think more and I make better decisions and his coaches do a lot of individual work with us. You can also see that because of the number of young players coming through.”

Of course nobody likes a crawler, so it is rather heartwarming to hear Emery’s assessment of his player’s first season in English football, which while complimentary, suggests there is much room for improvement. “At the beginning, I think he struggled in some matches but now I think professionally he is getting better, he feeling better,” said the Arsenal manager. “He is helping us with his experience as a strong centre-back. He is also intelligent in his decision-making when he is on the pitch.”

This intelligence will be put to the sternest of tests on Wednesday in Baku, when Sokratis comes up against Eden Hazard in what looks increasingly likely to be the Belgian playmaker’s final game for Chelsea. Mike Tyson famously opined that “everyone has a plan until they get a smack in the mouth”, so how do Arsenal hope to contain a player who, on his day, is among the best in the world and perfectly capable of administering a fat collective lip?

Sokratis boards the team flight at Luton airport on Saturday.Photograph: Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images

“He is a very good player but we also have very good players,” he says. “Of course, we plan for everybody but they are planning for us. It’s clear. It’s a final. We have good players. We have Aubameyang, Lacazette, Özil, they have Higuaín, Giroud. A lot of good players. We won’t be focusing on one player but on the team because I think in a final it is the team that wins the game. Maybe sometimes we saw that Messi or Ronaldo, they create chances and score two or three goals. But I think the better team in the final will win the cup.”

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Of course, one player Arsenal will be unable to call upon is Henrikh Mkhitaryan, who made recent headlines on the back of his decision, made in consultation with his employers and family, not to travel to Baku due to well-documented concerns for his personal safety. A friend of the Armenian midfielder since their days together at Borussia Dortmund, Sokratis is disappointed at the prospect of leaving behind a team-mate he says was instrumental in helping him make his decision to join Arsenal.

“I don’t like to be in his position, really,” he says. “I am very sad he will not be with us. He’s a good player and a very big player. And you know some times political things, something out of football … of course we are sad but we also have to play for him and for the players who were injured in the year.”

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Asked whether Uefa should have moved the final for political, as well as logistical reasons that will prevent all but a few thousand well-heeled and hardcore Gooners from travelling to Baku, Sokratis refuses to be drawn. “It’s not my position to say what Uefa should do,” he says. “They have been doing it a lot of years. They know better than us. What happened for us is not good.”

Some of his own family will be making the trip, however, having been first been subjected to a stringent vetting procedure to whittle out those who he considers to be bad luck. “I take the people who have watched me play before – and we won,” he laughs. “The others I ‘put out’. It’s like ‘black arts’. Four or five will come. I hope that they bring us luck.”