Fab Four sparkle but bend Liverpool out of shape in collapse at Arsenal

The battle for the top four produced a game that was all about fours, as both managers opted for a boldness of approach: the Fab Four Liverpool forward line against the back four of Arsenal.

Pep Guardiola has said, with a slight element of self-mockery, that his ideal team would feature 11 midfielders. This game seemed to look forward to a future in which everybody is either a forward or an attack-minded full-back and nobody pays too much attention to such dull and necessary parts of the game as defending.

If Arsenal’s tactical meltdown was entirely predictable, so too was Liverpool’s collapse. Liverpool should have been out of sight by half-time; that they weren’t meant that, even after getting the second goal shortly after the break, they remained vulnerable. Get beyond the advance guard and what lies beneath turns out to be very soft indeed.

This was the fifth time this season they have conceded three or more in a game. By the hour mark the game had become something that bore only the vaguest relation to high-level football, scruffy, manically stretched and hilariously entertaining. As James Milner observed, Liverpool were at fault for all three Arsenal goals. They do need to become more boring.

For all the hype around Liverpool’s Fab Four, they haven’t actually been hugely effective when playing together. There was, admittedly, the 7-0 home demolition of Spartak in the Champions League, and a 3-0 home league win over Southampton, but on the other three occasions Liverpool had started with Mohamed Salah, Philippe Coutinho, Roberto Firmino and Sadio Mané in harness, they have ended up drawing – one of those, not coincidentally, the 3-3 draw having been 3-0 up in the Champions League at Sevilla. The four together, perhaps, are just too attacking, equipped neither to regain possession nor to fall back and break the waves in the event of an opponent surfing a tide of momentum. Barely had Arsène Wenger decided he has resolved the problem of teams countering against his side by deploying a back three than he abandoned it. Perhaps it will return when Shkodran Mustafi is fully fit but this was the fourth game in a row in which Wenger has selected a back four. Oddly, the problem so far has been less a vulnerability to the counter than a stodginess in midfield. There was plenty of attacking menace after the switch to the back four against both Manchester United and Southampton – the problem in both those matches was taking the chances they created – but very little in two games against West Ham or the drab 1-0 home win over Newcastle. There was plenty of threat here, but that probably says more about Liverpool than it does about Arsenal.

And this, more than almost any other game, was one in which Arsenal had to guard against the danger of the counter. Their solution was to sit very deep, which perhaps did have the effect of negating the pace of Mané and Salah, but that is not a game that comes naturally to the rest of the side. Neither Granit Xhaka nor Jack Wilshere are exactly imposing and they were given little support by the creative trident.

The result was great open plains in which Coutinho merrily frolicked. Warning piled upon warning. Coutinho bent a shot just wide. He slipped a pass inside Héctor Bellerín for Andrew Robertson. He chipped a pass to Mané, creating an opening for a Robertson cross that Firmino headed just wide. He played a one-two with Mané and then crossed for Firmino again to miss the target. Ainsley Maitland-Niles, apparently preferred at left-back to Sead Kolasinac because of his superior pace and strength, looked a player unfamiliar with the position, struggling to defend the back post.

1:10

But Arsenal were either unable or unwilling to react. The only surprise when the opener arrived after 26 minutes was that it was the result of an orthodox breakaway, Coutinho combining with first Milner and then Salah before heading in as Arsenal mystifyingly sent both full-backs forward simultaneously.

That made Arsenal’s position even more precarious. Suddenly they were forced to come out, forced to commit themselves, leaving themselves vulnerable to just the sort of counterattack at which Liverpool are so adept. Had it not been for a bizarre sloppiness, Liverpool, as Wenger acknowledged, would have been two or three up by half-time.

Passes were needlessly misplaced, shots snatched at: perhaps the sense of chaos was contagious; perhaps, like a man applying his full weight on an open door in the expectation it was locked, it was just too easy and the result was an ungainly stagger. The second, to no great surprise, stemmed from a counterattack with Coutinho at its heart. That should have been game over.

As it turned out, thanks to the inability of either side to exercise any kind of control, it had only just begun.