Arsenal vs. Liverpool: *Bumper* Post-Match Analysis

Paul Tomkins, Andrew Beasley, Daniel Rhodes and other TTT regulars will give their thoughts on the match for 24 hours after the game, so the article received via email is unlikely to be the final version. There's statistics from the match and videos too.

Post-Match Thoughts

Paul Tomkins

In the end, a 2-2 draw at Arsenal is yet another improvement on last season, and it leaves Slot’s record as manager as Liverpool having played 13, won 11, drawn one, lost one.

Context

The context for this game was extra important, I feel, as it was not just any game, but one bound to be overhyped.

It was going to be a sign that Liverpool are champions-elect, or that Arne Slot has a lot to learn and in their first tough test (if you ignore the previous half a dozen tough tests) showed they are a bust.

The important thing was that, regardless of the result, Liverpool would end the day above Arsenal, having gone away to Arsenal. Priority one, this season, has to be to try and finish in the top four, and progress from the group-bloat of the Champions League.

The buildup to this game was marred by nonsense about Arsenal, at home and not undergoing any kind of managerial and stylistic transition, being underdogs – because of a few dropped points and possibly a few injured and suspended players.

In the end, both clubs missed four players due to injury, albeit two of Arsenal’s were reserve fullbacks.

Liverpool’s FIVE injured players didn’t count; Diogo Jota, scourge of the Gunners with seven goals against them for the Reds, yet again sidelined by an overly forceful foul tackle, and I guess Alisson, as the league’s best keeper, is irrelevant? Talk about narratives.

Harvey Elliott, broken foot? Federico Chiesa? Conor Bradley? Who are they? Are they as important as Kieran Tierney?

Last season I was writing about Density and Intensity, that looked into fixture difficulty in terms of opposition strength and days between games.

I can take this further, and it could be said to amount to Cumulative Effort.

Liverpool’s Cumulative Effort this week has been Chelsea (unbeaten since August) at home on Sunday, the joint-German league leaders away on Wednesday, and then Arsenal away within the space of eight days.

Two wins and a draw, and a ton of effort.

The Gunners had the far easier week of Bournemouth away (that they then complicated), followed by the doozy of Shakhtar Donetsk at home, with the Ukrainians behind the mighty Oleksandriya, Dynamo Kyiv and one of those giants of European football, FC Polissya Zhytomyr, in their war-torn league. Arsenal had an extra day to prepare for the Reds’ visit, and no travelling.

You can never know when Cumulative Effort will break you; just that, eventually, it probably will.

(In a similar way, Arsenal are suffering this via all the games they play with 10 men.)

It’s great to be tested like this, but it’s like fighting prime years Mike Tyson, Muhammad Ali, Lennox Lewis, Rocky Marciano and maybe even Rocky Balboa (“Adrián!”) every three days, before the bruises have healed and the energy has returned, and before bits of your ear have been stitched back on.

The toughest periods of Density and Intensity will get you, as:

• the laws of average say that you will win fewer points against the better sides (this is utterly logical);

• and that you’ll win even fewer points against top sides away;

• and that the less time you have to prepare for a game, the less prepared and fresh (and more prone to injury) you will be.

None of this condemns you to a defeat, but each is a factor in making it harder.

I’ve also pointed out that despite Liverpool supposedly playing no one of any quality, the Reds’ only dropped points in the first TWENTY-SEVEN (it still seems surreal) league games of 2019/20 was a late, Lallana-snatched away draw at a Man United who were near the relegation zone at the time, so even worse than this United. (Albeit United are falling fast.)

Liverpool won 26 of 27; and drew to strugglers at Old Trafford, because it’s Old Trafford. You can never say that Old Trafford is not a test.

(BBC, 2019: “Match stats - Klopp’s struggles against Solskjaer”. At least that problem didn’t last, with 4-2 and 5-0 wins to follow there, but still as outliers. Man United’s previous seven league games in October 2019 had seen just one win, 1-0 at home to Leicester City, via a penalty.)

AC Milan away, and now Chelsea at home and Leipzig away, are not easy games. And even Brentford, Bournemouth and Nottingham Forest are better than people realised.

So this game merited a bit more framing, to get it in perspective. Yet everything seemed to be about Arsenal missing six players, half of whom actually played.

At no point have I felt that Liverpool are proper title contenders this season; nor that they are not. It’s all quite new. The quality is generally there, but it’s a period of adjustment.

Every good result tilts the odds a little bit more in your favour, and every bad one tilts it a little against you (until it reaches a critical mass of too many defeats or dropped points).

I feared that the quality of Champions League opposition would add to the Cumulative Effort required (as will League Cup games that are only ever Premier League teams for Liverpool).

Plus, it’s a season of transition, and things could get bumpy at any time, before everyone learns together how to straighten things out.

This is what Rafa Benítez was essentially saying on a BBC article that they headlined “Why Slot's Liverpool still have a lot to learn”, as if he was saying that Slot and his team are a bunch of idiots.

‘Having a lot to learn’ is an insult; an accusation of naivety, of not being up to the task. Benítez was actually saying that Slot is still learning about his players and the league, which is very different. Battling back from going behind and grabbing a late equaliser away in a big game is all part of what he was talking about.

Yet win, lose or draw, the table would have said that Liverpool are title contenders; the emotion of the result would then sway the perceptions, with recency bias dictating everything. A quarter of the season is a pretty good sample size, to start taking a team seriously.

The majority of my analysis (longer than usual!) and the analysis of the others follows for subscribers only.