FIRMINO HAS LAST WORD IN THRILLER
Arsenal can’t hold on after fightback
WHATEVER happens over the next 14 days of holiday football, we may already have witnessed the highlight.
This was as good as it gets at the Emirates. Raise a glass to the Premier League — it rarely fails us when it really matters.
Yes, this game was full of holes and full of imperfections. In the Sky studios, they could have huffed and puffed and pushed gadgets and gizmos sternly around electronic screens all night.
The defending was lousy, the goalkeeping occasionally even worse and to watch both teams attack was at times like witnessing a lorry careering down the street with the driver asleep at the wheel. But in terms of the entertainment, excitement, glory and drama of it, this was the type of game that keeps people awake at night for all the right reasons.
When Manchester United came here and won 3- 1 earlier this month, we thought we had seen the most dramatic and eventful game of the season. This one probably topped it.
Liverpool should have won it. They were the better team for twothirds of the game. But then, incredibly, Arsenal could have won it on the back of three goals in five breathless second half minutes.
In the end, nobody was good enough to win it and that felt about right. Neither of these teams is consistently able to bother the scorers at the very top of the table but on nights like this we could watch them until they turn the floodlights off.
Neither manager will be particularly happy. How could they be?
This wasn’t grown-up football. It was straight from the schoolyard. For example, Arsenal’s attempts to close the game down after they somehow scrambled into the lead seemed to consist of piling bodies forward and hoping it would work. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t. Liverpool, on the other hand, never really look secure until they are four goals clear. If that sounds like an exaggeration, it isn’t.
Recent results between these teams had been one-sided enough to suggest that Arsenal had grown phobic of playing Liverpool. Certainly the home team’s first half performance suggested so. For the first 50 minutes Liverpool were superior in every way. Arsenal could not keep the ball long enough to worry them at one end and when Liverpool broke forward the home team were so fecklessly disorganised it was almost pitiful.
Liverpool should have been ahead early. Roberto Firmino missed two headed chances before Philippe Coutinho scored in the 26th minute. Substitute James Milner, on early for Jordan Henderson, sent Mo Salah away down the right and when the Egyptian’s cross was deflected in to the air, Coutinho was able to nod it over goalkeeper Petr Cech and into the net.
A goal up, Liverpool looked hungry and Arsenal disparate. Wenger’s team were sporadically dangerous on the break but without the ball they were drowning. Liverpool wasted two great opportunities right before half-time and Salah was guilty both times. But as Arsenal began the second period as they had played the first, they were breached again. Firmino worked wonderfully to play Salah in for a shot that took a deflection off Shkodran Mustafi on the way in. Arsenal were on their knees. There was a meekness about them that was quite startling and this was reflected in a darkening of the mood in the stands. But a goal almost immediately after Salah’s strike acted like an adrenalin shot for Arsenal and suddenly and most unexpectedly we were catapulted into the middle of the game of the season like blindfolded riders on a rollercoaster. Alexis Sanchez — hitherto anonymous — scored Arsenal’s first in the 53rd minute but it was
Liverpool defender Joe Gomez who played the greater part. Alexandre Lacazette’s cross was decent enough but Gomez had a yard and a half on Sanchez and only the youngster’s inexplicable hesitation allowed the Chilean to dive and head between Simon Mignolet’s legs.
So Arsenal suddenly had a sniff and two minutes later they had a proper scent of the impossible in their nostrils as Granit Xhaka advanced to drive a 25-yard shot through the middle of Mignolet’s porous defences. Klopp had warned of the danger posed by Swiss player beforehand but maybe Mignolet wasn’t listening. He could have saved the strike with two hands but chose to use just one and managed only to divert the path of the ball up into the roof of the net.
It was a dreadful moment for Mignolet and it remains to be seen if Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp begins to see what everyone else has been staring at for months. His goalkeeper isn’t good enough.
With the Emirates now alive, Arsenal came at Liverpool like a river in spate.
On the touchline, Klopp was frantic simply because he could see what was coming. Arsenal’s third goal was beautiful — Lacazette combining wonderfully with Mesut Ozil for the German to lift the ball over Mignolet — and it should have given them a platform to achieve something quite special.
But with more than half an hour left there was always likely to be a chance for to Liverpool to escape with their dignity. Arsenal made no attempt to lock the door — they lost the key some time ago — and when Firmino drove a shot into the goal off Cech’s hand from the edge of the penalty area nobody could say they were surprised.
With 20 minutes still to play, the only real winners were going to be the bookies. By this stage it was impossible to predict the next act.
Liverpool probably shaded the closing stages and could have won it when Salah shot through a