Arsenal’s Liverpool Trip Is The Perfect Occasion For Mikel Arteta To Affirm His Influence

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Arsenal supporters reading this before their team travels to Liverpool to take on Jurgen Klopp’s Reds on Monday night – the first of two games away at the Premier League
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champions in four days – will have an inkling as to what that collection of 27 letters represents. Each ‘D’ a draw, each ‘L’ a loss and a very conspicuous lack of the letter ‘W’ – it is perhaps the most discussed run of results in English soccer over the last few years.

For those who have not guessed, the sequence is Arsenal’s record away at the English top flight’s ‘Big Six’ since January 2015, when, inspired by a magical display from Santi Cazorla, they won at 2-0 on the road against then-champions Manchester City.

For Gunners fans, the letters make painful reading. For everyone else, they offer a little insight into the what and the why of the club’s recent malaise. Since that 2014/15 season, Arsenal have finished in the top four just once. And by not winning away at their main rivals, they have perfectly demonstrated the main issues: a lack of hard edge, of the determination to force through results in difficult circumstances and of the quality to triumph in games in which they have been the inferior side.

Go back to that blustery, wintry, Manchester afternoon almost six years ago, when goals from Cazorla and Olivier Giroud earned Arsenal the three points, and Mikel Arteta was still an Arsenal player, albeit an injured one ambling towards the end of a fine career. Arsene Wenger’s famous club-crested, knee-length puffer jacket was still seen on the touchlines of Premier League football stadia each weekend. A lot has happened since; little of it positive for Arsenal.

Yet since Arteta took the position that Wenger held for so long — after the Unai Emery interregnum — there has been a marked improvement in Arsenal’s play. A marked change in style, too. The intricate passing has not disappeared, but they are fitter, harder-running, and tougher to break down. Intensity has replaced languidness in the defensive transition.

It is a style that has pleased fans and, significantly, it is a style that gives them a far better chance of holding high-calibre opposition at bay. That much has already been proven. In July, Arteta’s men beat Liverpool in the Premier League (at the Emirates) and Manchester City in the FA Cup semi-final (at Wembley). In early August, they overcame Chelsea to lift the FA Cup for the fourteenth time. 28 days later, they were back at the home of English football to take the Community Shield against Liverpool after a 1-1 draw and a penalty shootout.

Each of those positive results further inflated the sense of euphoria in the red half of north London. And Arsenal fans’ excitement is understandable. It’s been a long while since Gunners had much to shout about, and in times of plague a little escapism is more than welcome.

Jurgen Klopp distilled the general consensus in his press conference on Friday. “Arteta has shown in a short period he seems to be an exceptional football manager,” said the German. But try to leave aside those heady summer months for a second, zoom out a little. Do so and Arsenal’s league record under Arteta is still… well, bad.

Despite that cup win, Arsenal’s eighth-place league finish last season was the worst for the club in a quarter of a century. In Arteta’s 22 league games in charge, they have won 11, drawn six and lost five, including embarrassing away defeats to Manchester City and local rivals Tottenham.

That record is not once of a top-four team and is no better than Unai Emery managed at the Emirates. Of course one must add all the caveats about Arteta coming in mid-way through the campaign, about having no pre-season and then a global pandemic thrust upon him, and about the mismatched squad he has had to work with.

But look at that record and last weekend’s narrow – some may say undeserved – victory over West Ham and you are reminded that this is still a project in its embryonic stage, a manager still learning at a club that is still rebuilding. Arteta is not blind to that fact. As he quite simply put it on Friday, “We need to keep improving.”  

This Monday’s trip to the northwest, then, is the perfect opportunity to demonstrate that improvement is ongoing and that the summer was something to build on rather than a joyous blip.

If Arsenal can win — or even if they put in a respectable performance and come away with a point — it feels that it may be more significant that merely three more points, that it may have some bearing on how the season develops and Arteta’s plans progress. Certainly, a league win would be far more psychologically powerful than a victory in the Carabao Cup match between the two sides that follows on Thursday night.

Having beaten Liverpool at home and drawn with them at Wembley, the Arsenal players will go into this game with a certain level of confidence that may have eluded them in years past; and an Anfield with no fans is a less intimidating proposition prospect than an Anfield with them. Leeds’ opening day performance at Anfield also showed that there are breaches to be exploited in Liverpool’s backline, providing something of a blueprint on how you might break the Reds’ 60-game unbeaten home record.

To come away from Anfield with a positive result would be an enormous dollop of affirmation, the most significant bit of evidence so far that Arteta’s Arsenal team is fundamentally different to what came before.