Arsenal have turned some of last season’s most painful away trips into the foundation of their title defence, with Sunday’s win at Anfield the clearest sign yet of how much this team has changed.
Mikel Arteta’s Unstoppable Red Machine rolled through Liverpool on Sunday night and, in the process, ended 14 years of misery at Anfield.
I guess it’s through that prism, really, that we should view last night’s outing in Prague. Especially as we, y’know, won the game despite that incredibly shaky second-half performance.
Despite finding the second half intensely irritating, I was quite amused to look at my Garmin after the game and see that my heart rate had run about 30 BPM lower than it had just three days earlier.
In essence, as annoying as Arsenal were on Wednesday night, they had a degree of scoreboard comfort and, well, let’s face it, Slavia Prague away just isn’t going to get the juices flowing in the way a trip to Anfield does.
Maybe the same is true for the players.
I liked that Mikel, though visibly and correctly annoyed by our second-half performance, had enough emotional intelligence to point out that this was our third away game on the bounce and 11th in 16 games this season.
When you put yesterday into that context, I think it’s okay to put the second half into a box and never open that box again.
Away games are hard, right? That’s the point of them.
Arsenal have done incredibly well with a calendar full of them, travelling unscathed to Naples and Munich, as well as Prague, on Champions League business.
Sunday was our fifth Premier League away game of the season and, for the purposes of this conversation, we’re going to disregard the 3-0 defeat at Brighton.
In the other four Premier League games, we’ve beaten Aston Villa, Sunderland, Nottingham Forest and now Liverpool.
And we’ve done so without conceding a goal.
Not only have we won those games without conceding, we made Premier League history by keeping Liverpool to no shots on target in a Premier League home game for the first time since the beginning of time, or maybe just the beginning of that statistic.
We’ve gone from two points from those four games last season to 12 points this season.
Even when you add the defeat at Brighton back into the mix, your Premier League champions are still seven points up on last season’s tally.
And we’ve been doing it without the best centre-back in the Premier League, William Saliba, happily restored to the playing squad last night.
Essentially, Arteta has created a defensive monster and any team who are going to score against us are going to have to work very hard to do so.
Even as stressful as the last 20 minutes of the first half at Liverpool felt to watch, really, for all the chaos Liverpool caused, they were basically reduced to slinging in crosses.
These were elementary, my dear Watson, for centre-backs of the calibre of Gabriel and Ezri Konsa.
Given that Andoni Iraola really did a tactical number on Arteta in our last encounter with him, I think we might have expected something a little more sophisticated from him here.
It was quite funny to read Football365 on Monday morning and see letters from people saying things like Arsenal may be effective, but they’ll never be loved.
I realise this will be different for those of you reading who grew up on the garlands thrown at our feet while the Invincibles were in town, but I didn’t.
I grew up on George Graham and all that entailed.
I don’t care whether we’re loved.
I don’t care if people preferred the Arteta team that was so thrilling to watch in 2022-23, until we ended up playing Kyle Reese to Manchester City’s Terminator on a cold Manchester night in February.
I do care, though, about the gold badge currently adorning our sleeves. I’d like it to stay there.
That being said, I don’t really understand how anyone with a brain and an honest perspective can accuse Arsenal of playing anti-football on Sunday.
An “anti football” team doesn’t score the goal that we did.
It’s obviously easier for Liverpool fans and “neutrals”, I use the term advisedly, to call us that because it masks their own shortcomings.
A £400m forward line, with the best part of 90 minutes to find an equaliser, and not one shot on target to keep the Kop warm.
Perhaps all the Scousers, in the media and elsewhere, should focus on that.
Steven Warnock was on co-comms for the BBC on Sunday. His face at full-time told quite the story.
I had to listen to Steve McManaman last night telling TNT viewers he would prefer a team that played better attacking football than we did.
Steve McManaman!
As if nobody remembers the fact he played for one of the dourest, most counter-attacking Liverpool teams, under Gerard Houllier, of all time.
I remember, Steve.
Don’t talk such nonsense, please.
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