Arsenal were ‘too scared’ to bring Henrikh Mkhitaryan to Azerbaijan to face 60,000 local fans, according to FK Qarabag coach Gurban Gurbanov.
Speaking ahead of the sides’ Europa League meeting in Baku on Thursday, the Qarabag number one suggested that the decision to leave out the Armenian was down to the reception he would likely have received from a hostile crowd in the Azerbaijan capital.
Mkhitaryan was left out of Borussia Dortmund’s squad to face Azeri side Qabala in 2015 owing to ongoing tensions between the governments of Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh mountains, from where Qarabag originally hail.