EPL TALK: Saka, Martinelli show Liverpool what they used to be
DEFEATS always feel worse when they include a time machine and a mirror, offering a glimpse back into the past to see how things used to be.
Liverpool saw themselves at the Emirates. They saw the team they once were; a younger, hungrier version, like an old mistress spying a new model in the ballroom. The Reds saw their past in Arsenal's future. And it may only get worse from here.
In 1980, Larry Holmes and Muhammad Ali famously cried together in the locker room, after the former sparring partner had taken down the greatest in the ring. Time had beaten Ali. Holmes had beaten a broken shell.
When he left the locker room, Ali famously cried: “Why you beat up on me, Holmes?”
A weary Jurgen Klopp might ask something similar of Mikel Arteta.
Like Holmes and Ali, it wasn’t so much the defeat, which was half-expected, but the unavoidable symbolism of the destruction that still resonates a day later. Arsenal beat Liverpool by playing like Liverpool, pressing so quickly and so often that their tactics bordered on intellectual property theft.
The Gunners' experiment in controlled chaos, moving through Liverpool like a remote-controlled avalanche, led to the hosts having 46 touches in their opponents’ box. This figure is higher than their previous five English Premier meetings combined (44). Only one other side popped up in Liverpool’s box more often. Manchester City managed 48 touches against the Reds in November 2019.
Such dominance is expected at City, but Arsenal’s remarkable mimicry – copying Liverpool’s hard-pressing and throwing it back at them like an annoying parrot – seems a bit sad now.
The Holmes and Ali analogy returns, as the apprentice usurps the master, leaving familiar, awkward questions for ailing greats. What happens when the legs go? Where do you go when the gegenpressing isn’t quick enough? How do weary minds close the gaps, on the right side of the back four, over and over again? Just as Ali couldn’t keep his hands up at the end, Liverpool are struggling to sustain a defence worthy of their legacy.
And so, inevitably, opponents sense weakness. They queue up to take a shot. Carlo Ancelotti arguably went first in the Champions League Final, encouraging Real Madrid to probe the same area repeatedly, like a trainer reminding his fighter to go for that gaping wound over the right eye.
Teams lining up to exploit Reds' weaknesses
Now they’re all at it. Arsenal, Brighton, Manchester United and Fulham have pummelled Trent-Alexander-Arnold, leaving him yelping on the pitch like the last dog in the shelter, vulnerable and in pain.
But Gabriel Martinelli was merciless, nonetheless, going the full Holmes and giving Liverpool one existential dilemma to ponder after another with every surge along the left. Remember when you guys did this? Remember when you picked off full-backs like this? Remember when you had the youth and tenacity to stop this? Not anymore.
The callous Brazilian was relentless, triggering an identity crisis with every slalom through a team no longer able to defend its own press, let alone take care of anyone else’s. Thiago Alcantara has always had the eye for a pass, but not the engine to track a winger. While Jordan Henderson is turning into Indiana Jones, not in the positive, swashbuckling sense, but more of the exhausted variety. It’s not the years, Hendo. It’s the mileage.
Actually, it’s the years and the mileage for Liverpool. Chasing a quadruple last season, they contested every possible fixture – all 63 of them - and six players chalked up more than 50 games, including Henderson, Mohamed Salah, Diogo Jota and Virgil van Dijk. Consistency continues to elude all of them.
And a recent post by CIES Football Observatory revealed that the average age of Arsenal’s team was around 24.43 years – the second youngest in the EPL – whereas Liverpool are toiling with the third oldest side (average age of 27 years 342 days old).
And it shows. In almost every outfield position, Arsenal appear to be mocking the Reds with younger, livelier versions of their former selves, like a surreal X-Men movie, days of football past.
Bukayo Saka has collected three goals and four assists from his last six EPL games by essentially looking like a switched-on Salah, beginning on the right, but treating established lines like an anarchic colouring book addict. Salah, in depressing contrast, is paying the price for the breakdown of Klopp’s beloved press. A patchy 4-2-3-1 isolates the Egyptian.
William Saliba is this season’s van Dijk, a revelatory, era-shaping figure at centre-back. Gabriel Jesus runs, irritates and pesters in a fashion reminiscent of Sadio Mane. Granit Xhaka and Thomas Partey are both benefiting from Arteta’s tactical discipline, offering the kind of protection that has been missing from Liverpool’s line-up long enough to force a formation change and wipe out Alexander-Arnold’s confidence.
But Martinelli and Saka were the true Dickensian characters tormenting Liverpool, the real ghosts of campaigns past. The Reds once had “mentality monsters”. At the Emirates, they faced them, a couple of fresh gegenpressing graduates, revelling in those little spaces that Klopp’s men previously dominated.
Arsenal’s victory wasn’t so much a changing of the guard as it was a stealing of the template. They simply pressed better and faster with younger players. Like a bride on her wedding day, something was borrowed to beat something old with something new.
Whether the Gunners can maintain a title challenge is anyone’s guess, but their triumph seemed to suggest, rather poignantly, that Liverpool’s glorious era might be slowly coming to an end.
Arsenal’s victory wasn’t so much a changing of the guard as it was a stealing of the template. They simply pressed better and faster with younger players. Like a bride on her wedding day, something was borrowed to beat something old with something new.
Neil Humphreys is an award-winning football writer and a best-selling author, who has covered the English Premier League since 2000 and has written 26 books.
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