Three Things We Learned from Arsenal 0 v 2 Liverpool – by Alan Alger

Rest is the most important thing in the next fortnight…

The squad head off to Dubai for warm-weather training as we have a weekend break from competitive action. Mikel Arteta’s time on the flight to the upmarket resort might be occupied with trying to find solutions to a number of problems. You’d expect squad management and potential transfers to be right near the top of his personal to-do list.

After the defeat against Liverpool he sensibly didn’t promise any transfer activity. I understand that. If he suddenly promised singings, then he’d be compelled to deliver even if the right player wasn’t there. If he said that he was happy with the squad as it is, then fans might question that, especially off the back of three defeats.

While you’d hope that the players practice their finishing while they’re away, I think it’s really important that they get lots of sunshine and recharge for what will be a brutal end to the season. If we continue to fight on the remaining two fronts then we’ll face games against opponents of the calibre of yesterday’s victors. They’re back at the Emirates in February and hopefully Mo Salah will still be in Ivory Coast with Egypt.

We’ve still got to go to Manchester twice, an away North London derby and host Chelsea, Villa and Newcastle. On top of increasingly difficult European opposition if we get past Porto. These are the times we want as fans, but the pressure to deliver is now on this team and manager. We don’t want too many of those days to turn into the disappointment we faced yesterday.

More misunderstood numbers accompany our cup exit…

In the last 275 days we’ve played 29 league games and have won 15 of them, a win rate of just over 50%. In all of that time our points according to ‘expected goals’ is actually 3 points lower than those we took in reality, in those games.

29 games is a fair sample size, although data and league tables can lie. Also, across that sample of matches there are a few games we lost that we should have won, a few games we drew that we should have lost and a few games we drew that could have gone either way – and all the various combinations vice versa.

As I said last week we should also trust our eyes on this kind of thing and add that football knowledge and context to what we’ve been seeing. A lot of data led accounts have taken an anomaly like the West Ham home game and tried to portray that if we keep doing what we’ve been doing then everything will be fine. They’re essentially putting it all down to luck off the back of one game and saying that luck will suddenly be outrun by the numbers.

But as you can see from the numbers above we’re actually slightly outperforming those xG and stats over a sample size of nine months and the last 29 Premier League games. Luck is playing a part, but only to our benefit at the moment. If any correction needs to be made it might actually be to our detriment.

We won on expected goals yesterday which suggests we were unlucky. Other people of a certain vintage might call it not taking your chances and being punished. Overall Liverpool scored where it counted in a reasonably even game. Lots of our chances were of low quality or were accompanied by bad decision making. Low quality and bad decision making usually has nothing to do with luck.

We need to improve!

Perspective on the boss…

Mikel Arteta is now just over four years into his reign as Arsenal manager. He’s also just over four years into his career as a manager, this being his first job. The risks with appointing a first-time manager come from their lack of experience of dealing with certain situations, meaning that any first-timer mistakes are guaranteed to be made with your club.

If you’re patient and you think you have the right guy then you allow those first-timer mistakes as long as they’re not repeated over and over again. It’s my firm belief that, although Arteta is stubborn, we haven’t seen him making the same mistakes repeatedly.

The boss had to deal with taking over at a club suffering from mistakes and mismanagement that were nearly a decade in the making. He made us contenders again as we saw last season. We’re also reaping the rewards of that achievement by being back at Europe’s top table in this campaign.

He also had to deal with that tough Covid period where it was hard to make a connection with the fans, although some have cited that empty stadiums during that time helped him due to how bad the results had to get, before they got better. Covid has also given us a skewed perspective of how long he’s actually been at the helm. I even had to double check the figures in the opening paragraph as it didn’t quite feel right.

For comparison, George Graham (who also inherited a mess) had already won the League Cup, the League title and had placed in the top four in 75% of his seasons (not that top four was as much of a prize back then) by his fourth anniversary in charge.

Arsene Wenger notably landed a Premier League and FA Cup double within his first four seasons and didn’t drop out of the top three in the table during that time. Although he had inherited bundles of talent and added some incredible signings of his own.

In an unusual rally against the prevailing pressurised climate bosses find themselves under – especially at huge clubs like ours – it’s probably the case that Arteta is afforded more time even if we end up without silverware this season. Football may have changed, but so has the club and I believe the hierarchy think it would be ludicrous to discard someone that has us back contending again. I agree.

A run of five league matches, which are nicely spaced out to allow recovery time, ahead of a vital trip to Porto will hopefully focus the minds of the manager, his coaches and most importantly his players.