Arsene Wenger has praised the character shown by the Arsenal players during their 1-0 win over Red Star Belgrade on Thursday evening.

Red Star Belgrade’s Serbian support was in full voice in the Europa League on Thursday night and despite the game itself being pretty uneventful, the atmosphere alone would have been pretty intimidating, especially for the young players. However, they sucked it up and did a decent job.

“I agree with you not only in their performance, but they showed character as well,” said the boss.

“It is not easy to express yourself at 18 years of age. To play in such a heated atmosphere shows how much resilience to stress (the players have), which is an important quality at our level.

“I believe that it was a very difficult game with high intensity in a very heated and supportive atmosphere for the local team and we kept going and trying to win the game, and them as well in fairness.

“We played against a good Red Star team who were always dangerous on the counter-attack. Petr Cech made some good saves and in the end we got a win that gives credit to the mentality of the team.”

Arsenal have now won three out of three Europa League matches, putting us top of our table.

When the Gunners finished in fifth last season, not many fans actually cared about doing well in the Europa League but now that it appears to be our only realistic route back into the Champions League, we’re changed our tune.

Arsene Wenger put out a mixture of youth with experience on Thursday evening, starting the likes of Reiss Nelson, Joe Willock and Ainsley Maitland-Niles, as well as Mathieu Debuchy, Theo Walcott and Olivier Giroud.

Jack Wilshere also racked up another appearance for the first team.

As Wenger said, they showed character to continue fighting until the end, even though a 0-0 draw away in a formidable stadium wouldn’t have been a disaster.