David Raya matched one Arsenal record and broke another on Wednesday night, keeping a clean sheet in the second leg of the Champions League quarter-finals.
David Raya didn’t necessarily have his best game in an Arsenal shirt on Wednesday night, but he did help the Gunners to progress to the Champions League semi-finals after back-to-back clean sheets against Sporting CP.
Those clean sheets saw Raya match Arsenal’s record for their most clean sheets in a Champions League campaign, set by Jens Lehmann in the 2005/06 run to the final.
Raya will now have the opportunity to improve on his total of eight in the semi-final tie against Atletico Madrid.
Raya also broke the record for Arsenal’s most Champions League clean sheets of all time, reaching 18 in 33 matches.
That total sees him edging ahead of Lehmann in the club’s all-time standings, with all the players to keep more than one Champions League clean sheet for the Gunners listed below:
- David Raya: 18 clean sheets (33 games)
- Jens Lehmann: 17 clean sheets (35 games)
- Manuel Almunia: 14 clean sheets (32 games)
- Wojciech Szczesny: 10 clean sheets (23 games)
- David Seaman: 9 clean sheets (34 games)
- Lukasz Fabianski: 4 clean sheets (14 games)
- Petr Cech: 3 clean sheets (5 games)
- David Ospina: 3 clean sheets (14 games)
- Stuart Taylor: 2 clean sheets (5 games)
Raya is still a long way off the most clean sheets in the competition’s history (Manuel Neuer, 64), and he sits at 29th in the standings overall. But two more clean sheets would put him into the top-25, so perhaps that should be his target for the remainder of the current campaign.
For a player who only made his Champions League debut at the age of 28, that would be an impressive feat, and it’s a big part of the reason why Arsenal remain the only unbeaten team in the competition this season.
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