3 key lessons from Liverpool ahead of West Ham trip

For 40 minutes at Anfield, Arsenal were superb. They had confidence, swagger and ruthlessly manoeuvred Liverpool to score two goals in the first half hour.

However, after going on to draw the game, Mikel Arteta’s post-mortem will be key to unpicking what went wrong to ensure Arsenal have a quick bounce back to winning ways.

The easy analysis of the momentum swing is to point to Granit Xhaka’s scuffle with Trent Alexander-Arnold, as a point where the crowd woke up. However, after looking back with a clear head, that moment has been vastly overstated, and Liverpool had multiple chances right before it happened, and scored from the move immediately following.

3 key lessons from Liverpool ahead of West Ham trip

So what can Arsenal put right?

1. The basics

Arsenal came to Anfield with a swagger, but at 0-2, they became overconfident. They were playing one-touch football in their own box at times and making it look easy, but it was inviting the Liverpool press, which is fine with William Saliba at the back, but with Rob Holding, it’s a different story.

That overconfidence almost caught up with Arsenal when Holding opted to play a reverse pass in his own half to Oleksandr Zinchenko, which was intercepted and led to a big chance that Mo Salah missed.

That should have been a wake-up call for Arsenal. Keep it simple, make your passes and keep the opposition out of the game until halftime.

The same continued through the second half, with the usual cohesion being completely off between Ben White, Bukayo Saka, Martin Odegaard and Thomas Partey, meaning Arsenal struggled to get out of their own half when under pressure, despite playing very well from the 56th to 81st minute when Liverpool didn’t have a shot on goal.

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