Arsenal vs Liverpool player ratings: Wow, that happened

Arsenal hosted champions Liverpool after a horrid showing in the North London Derby. Here are the player ratings from the match.

Arsenal was coming off of perhaps their worst result of the season in terms of disappointment, as they blew a 1-0 lead after it lasted for less than a minute and fell in the North London Derby despite so many promising results leading up to the match.

Which segued so perfectly into a match against Premier League champions Liverpool, who had nothing to play for and all the fluidity in the world.

Arsenal didn’t have much to fight for either, so with the FA Cup semifinal match against Manchester City coming up at the weekend, Mikel Arteta rotated fairly extensively.

Most noticeably, he left out arguably his two best performers—Pierre-Emerick Aubaeyang and Dani Ceballos. In their stead, we saw Lucas Torreira inserted into the midfield, with Nicolas Pepe and Reiss Nelson rounding out the attack.

It didn’t start well. Liverpool looked incredibly comfortable and the Gunners looked completely lost. Liverpool made it look easy in the 19th when they dissected this defence, making both Granit Xhaka and Kieran Tierney look pretty bad.

It was shaping up to look like a pretty depressing match. The centerbacks hoofed the ball forward, Liverpool reclaimed, came back at Arsenal, rinse and repeat.

Then, out of nothing, Lacazette plucked up a mistake from van Dijk (prompted by Reiss Nelson) and gave us the equalizer. Another mistake gave the Gunners another goal, believe it or not. Two shots on target, two goals, zero attacking thrust. All the Gunners did was capitalize on Liverpool mistakes. I’m definitely not complaining.

Here are the player ratings:

Goalkeeper