Keystone Kops at The Emirates
Arsenal 3 Liverpool 1, 4th February 2024.
ARSENAL 3 (Saka 14, Martinelli 67, Trossard 90+2)
LIVERPOOL 1 (Gabriel own goal 45+3)
I haven’t had the arduous task of writing about too many Liverpool defeats so far this season and this one will be a bittersweet 90 minutes of my life, but not quite as wince inducing as the 90 minutes spent watching a game Sky TV will no doubt be lauding as a “classic” as I sit here hiding away in the kitchen! With all Red honesty, the team in the alternative kit of all purple got exactly what they deserved from a quite dreadful game this evening in North London. Nothing.
The only other occasion this season in which Liverpool have taken nothing from a Premier League game was but a few miles across North London and the VAR inspired horror show that saw the Reds taste another bittersweet defeat, this time at Tottenham Hotspur. Two inconsequential defeats have been suffered by an experimental and youthful Liverpool in a Europa League from which they’d already qualified from so they didn’t and never will matter. But this evening just might.
Arsenal fully deserved their win and have closed the gap at the top of the Premier League to just 2 points and Manchester City, 5 points behind, have 2 games in hand. So without wishing to get ahead of ourselves the Mighty Reds still sit top of the league after just 2 meaningful defeats all season long, they will be contesting for the Carabao League Cup at Wembley at the end of this month and remain in every competition they entered in August.
But this was a self-inflicted horror show from which only Luis Díaz can walk away from with any kind of footballing honour. His teammates surrounding him in the all purple were abject.
With a capital A.
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I have no idea where the team who demolished Chelsea on Wednesday evening have disappeared to but the Reds appeared to have taken their place today as Arsenal inflicted upon Liverpool the tenacious, high paced, incisive and inventive football the Reds had subjected the Chelsea Blues to in midweek. Whilst Liverpool didn’t muster a single shot on target in the first half, Arsenal fared little better but, and it’s a big but, were by far the better team. Their quick thinking football tore holes throughout the middle of a sloppy Liverpool who never, ever got started, were far too easy to “play through” and soft in the tackle from back to front. Much like Chelsea in midweek and so unlike the Liverpool of recent games. Luis Díaz was the Reds only beacon of hope in a dreadful first 45 minutes and it was his tenacity in injury time that forced the comical and calamitous own goal from Gabriel Magalhães that levelled Arsenal’s slick team goal on 15 minutes that ended with Bukayo Saka tapping home with a simple rebound after a smart save from Alisson Becker denied Kai Havertz.
After a no doubt verbal flailing from manager Jürgen Klopp at half-time the Reds created more in the opening 30 seconds of the 2nd half than they did in the entire first 45 minutes and by the triple substitution and introduction of Andy Robertson, Harvey Elliott and Darwin Núñez on 55 minutes they had a modicum of control over the game and on the hour mark, Luis Díaz finally registered a shot on the Arsenal goal that was tamely handled and comfortably saved by David Raya. The Reds were finally in the game.
And then they shot themselves squarely in the foot.
A simple straight long ball from Gabriel Magalhães should have been dealt with dismissively by Virgil van Dijk but he hesitated, Alisson Becker rushed from his goal and missed his kick, and whilst we all wondered if we were seeing a real time glitch in The Matrix, Gabriel Martinelli gleefully rolled the ball into an empty net. Captain Virgil van Dijk admitted “full responsibility” for the goal and called it a “turning point” in a second half his team were “dominating” in his after match interviews. I’d slightly disagree with the dominating comment as I saw Liverpool now in the game but hardly in charge. There was no great cavalry charge to secure an equaliser or any intense pressure mounted on the Arsenal goal before the evening went from bad to worse and then, to all rather embarrassing. Caught up field trying to assist with the Reds attack, Ibrahima Konaté body-checked Kai Havertz for a second yellow card and now the red card that dismissed him from the field of play before a now 10 man Liverpool were caught out on the vacant right hand side of defence for Leandro Trossard to sprint through on goal and via a deflection from the boot of Virgil van Dijk, saw his shot squirt through the legs of Alisson Becker and into the back of his net.
This inadvertent “nutmeg” of a goal kind of summed up the entire evening and an evening in old London town to forget.
In a hurry.
A final word from The Boss
“Right from the start it didn’t really look like our day but maybe we could have turned it into our day — second half, the start was really good. Again, it is just proof, evidence, whatever you want, what momentum makes. First half, Arsenal started well, that’s clear. We didn’t play enough football, we needed to get used a little bit to each other, like the right-side triangle — it was tricky to find, let me say it like that. Actually, second half we were there, we now understood how the game goes. We now had the momentum after the late equaliser in the first half, but then we concede a second goal — and it was a very strange goal. Now we spoke in the dressing room with all people involved and it is just unlucky. Can you head the ball directly? Yes, but it flies strange. Then, should you expect Martinelli brings the body a little bit? Yes, but we didn’t and then all of a sudden the ball rolls there and he has an easy goal”.
“Arsenal deserve the three points, there is no doubt about that: they scored three and we had one shot on target, so that’s obviously the one stat that shows the most. We should have had more of that, we could have had more of that, but because of the story of the game it didn’t happen”.
“We got a present for our first goal, we forced it, but then, as I said, the story of the second half, we will never know how it would have been if we don’t concede the goal. Our two main guns, a misunderstanding, that just shows they are human beings. That actually makes the thing they usually do even more special because sometimes you forget they are humans as well. For today, the boys are not happy, we are not happy, 100 per cent — but that’s it now, we don’t have to make more of a game. If you play an away game at Arsenal, you can play super here and lose. I would have loved to have seen that, but it’s possible. That’s why we take it, deal with it and go from here”.
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