A long ball from Aaron Ramsdale dropped in the centre of the Liverpool half. Gabriel Magalhães tried to flick it to Eddie Nketiah but Ryan Gravenberch intercepted. Declan Rice moved to pressure Gravenberch, who passed it forward to Darwin Nuñez. Rice raced after Nuñez, pursuing him into the Arsenal half, but just as he was about to challenge Nuñez dabbed it on to Diogo Jota. Now Rice chased Jota, getting within a metre of the ball but not quite close enough to stop Jota’s pass to the unmarked Luis Diaz. Onwards charged Rice in a last desperate effort to block the shot, but Diaz’s first touch was good and with his second he crashed the ball into the top corner for 2-0.
What a moment for Diaz, who was stretchered off on his last visit to this ground with what turned out to be a season-wrecking knee injury. The lasting curse of an injury like that is that afterwards, whenever you have a few mediocre games in a row – even if you have had off-field problems everyone knows about, like, say, your parents being kidnapped – people will say you’ve never been the same since the injury. Diaz has proven in his last few matches that the rumours of his demise have been greatly exaggerated, and his performance at Arsenal suggested that he should be the one to fill in for Mo Salah on Liverpool’s right while the superstar is on Afcon duty.
But back to Rice. How can it be that four Liverpool players are involved in a move which takes the ball 70 yards from the middle of their half to the back of the Arsenal net and Declan Rice is the only one of 11 Arsenal players who gets close to putting in any kind of challenge?
“We need a killer,” Ian Wright tweeted towards the end of the first half, with a picture of himself gazing enigmatically into the camera
True, it was the last minute, Arsenal were effectively already beaten, and maybe something in their collective subconscious was telling them that the last thing they wanted to do was score an equaliser that would force a replay which could cost them a chunk of their winter break.
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Maybe it was simply a question of exhaustion. Their return to the Champions League has asked a lot of Arsenal. If you compare the 11 Arsenal players who have played the most minutes with their equivalent 11 at Liverpool, the Arsenal players have played 22% more football this season. Few teams need that winter break more.
Whatever the reason, in that last minute it looked like Rice was the only one who was still trying and that was a bad look.
The shambles belied Arteta’s post-match insistence that “merit-wise, there is no question about who deserves to win the game.” Arsenal should certainly have led at half-time, but it was Liverpool who ultimately proved more resourceful and more ruthless.
“We need a killer,” Ian Wright tweeted towards the end of the first half, with a picture of himself gazing enigmatically into the camera. A joke maybe, but it felt pointed. Out on the pitch, Kai Havertz had just fumbled another chance. For the third match in a row, Arteta had picked a different player in the middle of his front three. Gabriel Jesus had missed big chances against West Ham, Eddie Nketiah performed a disappearing act against Fulham, now it was Havertz’s turn to show what he could do.
He produced the most wretched performance yet, twice wasting great chances by failing to shoot, heading another chance harmlessly wide, failing to control a through-pass in another promising situation. Only Arteta knows why he waited until the 88th minute to take him off.
By full-time, millions of Arsenal fans around the world were screaming for the club to sign a new striker in January. Arteta pleaded with them to choose love not hate: “What I beg from the supporters is that they are behind the team like they have been in difficult moments. Stick behind the ones that we have. They are incredibly good... Stick by them. That’s exactly what they need. Then they feel important and supported. With their attitude, they don’t deserve anything different.”
Except it’s hard to imagine how Arsenal fans could support Havertz any more than they already have. They have been willing him to succeed almost desperately, to the extent that they greeted his first goal for the club – from a penalty that had been charitably donated to him by the regular penalty taker Bukayo Saka – with a song mocking the Havertz haters: “Waka waka eh eh, £60 million down the drain, Kai Havertz scores again!”
The decision looks even worse when you consider that Arsenal already had a better midfielder than Havertz on the books
It’s hard to imagine this song has much of a future. The Havertz signing looks like the rock this Arsenal season will perish on. It’s not just because he has played even worse in his first season for Arsenal than he did in his last season at Chelsea. It’s because spending £60 million on him cost them the opportunity to improve the team in some other way. What they needed was a forward who could score more regularly than Gabriel Jesus while contributing more to the overall play than Eddie Nketiah. There was no need to worry about disturbing the “established” front three. Having five quality forwards competing for three positions seems to be working out pretty well for Liverpool.
The decision looks even worse when you consider that Arsenal already had a better midfielder than Havertz on the books. Granit Xhaka endured some miserable times in north London but he had eventually matured into one of the core players of the side. His natural fire and passion tempered at last by a decade of top-level experience, last season saw him produce his best-ever Premier League campaign, with seven goals and seven assists from midfield.
Apparently, underestimating Xhaka’s importance in the overall chemistry, Arsenal sold him in the summer to Bayer Leverkusen for £20 million. Leverkusen are unbeaten in the first half of the season and Xhaka has just been named the best midfielder in the Bundesliga by Kicker magazine. So at least one member of Arsenal’s 2023 challengers still has a great chance of winning the title in 2024.
