MAGIC MIK

Merino nets twice as Gunners claim clean sheet No.8

- TOM CANTON in Prague

IT was a record-breaking night and a record-equalling night for Arsenal.

And for Mikel Merino, once again a night where if a striker’s only job is to score goals, he showed how good he is at it.

Merino filled in at the tip of the Arsenal spear to help Mikel Arteta’s side claim a fourth straight Champions League win.

As they triumphed, they did so without conceding a goal for the eighth successive match - equalling a 122-year club record.

Yet were it not for referee Aliyar Aghayev being sent to the VAR screen to reconsider his decision to award a penalty to Slavia Prague - after Ben W’s ‘foul’ on Lukas Provod - that clean sheet accolade might have fallen. On equalling the club record from 1903, Arteta said: “That's a long time ago, so it tells you about the difficulty of achieving it.

“There's a lot of work there to achieve that. The most pleasing thing is probably not the record, it's the mindset of the players.