Daniel’s Debrief: Arsenal 3-1 Liverpool

First time this season you can say they’ve just not been anywhere near good enough.

Not just individually but as a collective. This was a poor showing in the main with three shambolic moments dropped in, that cost us any chance at the game.

I was worried when Dominik Szoboszlai was ruled out and Ryan Gravenberch started. Szoboszlai’s off-the-ball work ends up being a huge miss.

Conor Bradley has been brilliant in the last month and his personal circumstances keep him out of this one.

What strange, though, is that Liverpool play as if he’s still there - with Joe Gomez inverting from the left and Trent Alexander-Arnold up and down on the right.

This made no sense to me and meant that Liverpool couldn’t get anything going through the middle.

They keep going for the ball over the top but their best exponent of it sees so little of the ball. It’s a weird decision from Jurgen Klopp.

We create so, so little in the first half. Both of our chances fall to Cody Gakpo and he fires wide after a brilliant pass from Alexis Mac Allister, and doesn’t force the opening after a cross from Alexander-Arnold.

Gakpo was poor and offered nothing in the way of a threat, though it’s worth saying that Diogo Jota was silent too. 

We just didn’t have a way of getting high up the pitch. Without Darwin Nunez, we couldn’t get it up there and the midfield just wasn’t progressing the ball.

Mac Allister was the best of the three, but Curtis Jones has his sloppiest game in a while. I’m a huge Jones fan, but he’s been pretty poor at both the Etihad and the Emirates.

Ryan Gravenberch has a largely horrendous game. Most were pretty confident in the build-up to the game but when the lineup drops, there was concern about him.

He has the ability but he doesn’t have the intensity that someone like Szoboszlai has. He is far too casual at times and has got to get himself more involved.

He and Gakpo are players that should be exclusively reserved for games against lower-standard opposition.

Where I have sympathy for Klopp is that in losing Nunez and Szoboszlai for the starting lineup, he loses key attributes in big games as well as personnel.

Defensively, playing out from the back is problematic for us and it feels like we suffer from it in a lot of big games.

The first goal is a bad one. Virgil Van Dijk over-commits into midfield completely unnecessarily and that leaves Joe Gomez and Ibrahima Konate looking after Kai Havertz.

Havertz never looks scoring but the shot deflects off Alisson into the path of Bukayo Saka, who is all alone after Gomez moved over to deal with Havertz.

And after a sluggish and lethargic opening period, Liverpool had gone behind to a really poor goal.

Gabriel Martinelli causes problems down the left flank all through the first half and puts on a breathtaking show of pace to beat Ibrahima Konate in a foot race.

I think Konate is Liverpool’s best player in the first half. It all goes wrong for him later on but he, Gomez, Luis Diaz and Mac Allister are the few coming out of the game with even any credit for me.

Liverpool get a completely undeserved goal when Diaz refuses to give up on a Gravenberch pass and some uncertain defending from William Saliba results in Gabriel turning it home.

At 1-1, right on the stroke of half-time, you’re thinking Liverpool will be galvanised and Arsenal will be hurt.

They’d been so much better than us for that first 45 minutes. Jorginho was majestic at times, his intelligence and use of the ball was the best on the park.

Declan Rice’s dynamism and Martin Odegaard’s creativity are things that Liverpool don’t have any answer to on the day.

And yet somehow, they have parity at half-time.

For a short period after the break, it looks like the equaliser has changed the psychology of both teams as Liverpool have a bright spell at the start of the second half.

Crucially, the Reds force no openings, though, and are reduced to distance strikes from Mac Allister, which all whistle just wide.

Liverpool carve out just 0.4xG all day, an alarmingly low figure. This is the most concerning part of the whole performance, I think.

Arsenal’s xG of 3.7 is inflated greatly by the open goals that Saka and Martinelli are presented for their finishes and ultimately, are dominant as the home team.

I can live with that, but our own xG is a cause for concern. It’s similar to the game at the Etihad in November except we defended a lot better that day and earned a 1-1 draw.

The only real chance of any note from the away team comes to Nunez after he comes on. He lashes over after some good work initially.

But, the xG and the general lack of creativity from the off confirms what we all know - Nunez is an integral part of Liverpool’s strongest XI.

It’s probably the first time in the last month where Mohamed Salah has been greatly missed, with no-one to make runs from out to in or to feed other places from tight spaces.

Not one part of the team performs. The attack is starved and not clinical. The midfield is outclassed. And the defence and goalkeeper borders on a shambles.

Van Dijk and Alisson fail to communicate for the Martinelli goal and it’s pretty much identical to what they do at Fulham in 2019, presenting Ryan Babel with an open goal that day.

For me, this one is more on Van Dijk than Alisson. Van Dijk enables the situation to come about with his hesitant approach, allowing the ball to bounce.

This alerts Alisson who comes out, and the trio of Alisson, Van Dijk and Martinelli end up in tight proximity, with neither Liverpool man able to deal with the situation.

For all their dominance and good play, Liverpool are 2-1 down thanks to two astonishingly poor goals.

It gets worse when Konate is sent off for a second yellow card - maybe a little harsh given Havertz’s theatrics and then what Gabriel gets away with on Nunez shortly afterwards, but not too many complaints to be had either.

And then the third goal, Leandro Trossard has no problem taking on a right-hand side of defence that consists of Diaz and Elliott, and slots home under Alisson.

This one is completely Alisson’s fault, and whatever your opinion on the Martinelli goal, it’s Van Dijk and Alisson - two of the most consistent players in the league - who cost us the goals.

Alisson is the best goalkeeper in the world by most people’s reckoning, but he does have one of these games in him every single season, and they always seem to come in big ones.

The frustration for me is that whilst this was a bit of a masterclass from Mikel Arteta - his team’s pressing mean that Arsenal are on top all game long, as well as the quality of Jorginho and Rice’s individual performances - the three goals are all pathetic errors.

Arsenal are a very good team and this was probably one of their best performances of the season but there must be worries about how wasteful they are in front of goal.

However, Arteta manages this match considerably better than Klopp. The Gakpo and Gravenberch starts don’t work at all, neither does the inversion of Gomez.

He brings on Nunez, Andy Robertson and Harvey Elliott. Nunez and Robertson make sense, with the presumption that Alexander-Arnold would then move into midfield.

So there’s surprise when he is the one taken off for Elliott. This comes just as Liverpool are looking the more likely team at 1-1 and is a killer of a decision.

He may not have been fit enough to do 90 minutes, but throwing such a diminutive player into a midfield battle we were already second best in felt like a disaster waiting to happen from the manager.

Klopp also does something which he might have never done at Liverpool before - start a whole eleven of right-footers. It’s perhaps no surprise how little joy Liverpool get out wide when there’s such a lack of natural width - Diaz on the right would’ve made a lot more sense, particularly given what the system was with the full-backs.

It’s not a terminal result but it’s a bad one. By the time Liverpool kick off against Burnley on Saturday, they are likely to be behind Manchester City and the gap to Arsenal is down to just two points.

It’s still a healthy position but it’s much more precarious and the next four games before Liverpool take on City at Anfield have all become must-wins.

There’s no need for an overreaction to this defeat against a very good team, who were just much better. But, in not beating Arsenal at home, Liverpool have taken just one point from six against them.

Over the course of a season, losing such a quantity of points to a rival can end up defining title races.

Performances in these games need to improve because in nine years of the Klopp era, we’ve only got two away wins against sides that finished in the top three each season (Stamford Bridge in 2016 and Old Trafford in 2021).

The flip side is that it’s taken until February for Liverpool to lose a game on their own merit but unlike Tottenham in September, this was not a defeat where there’s any mitigation or positives to take.

Liverpool stank the place out and got exactly what they deserved.

Daniel