English Premier League: Liverpool v Arsenal, Anfield, Saturday, 5.30pm (Live on Sky Sports)
Got on a lucky one. Came in at 18-1*. I’ve got a feeling, this year’s for me and you. Well, perhaps. On the other hand we could just wait until April, the Guardiola spring surge, some post-op Kevin De Bruyne, and take another look then.
For now Arsenal’s trip to Anfield looks like a rare opportunity for Jürgen Klopp and Mikel Arteta. In an agreeably cinematic turn, and with all due deference to the presence of Aston Villa in the mix, the penultimate game of the pre-festive pile-up is in effect a playoff for the key ceremonial role of Top Of The League On Christmas Day.
This shouldn’t mean much in the wider scheme of things. Christmas is not a sport-related event. Christmas is shopping, familial regret and an argument about meat. Christmas has precisely zero bearing on things such as team-building, squad depth, executive management and all the other elements that actually decide who gets to win.
On the other hand: Top Of The League On Christmas Day! In a sport still bound up with its own private voodoo of signs and rituals and omens, Top of the Table at Christmas just feels good, an authentic register of things such as morale and internal energy. Bring us your snow-shrouded graphics, your pundits in jumpers, the strange energy of the Match of the Day Christmas tree, the sense above all of plot points and markers in the year.
Dig a little and the Christmas power rankings are also an accurate indicator of future performance. Ten of the past 14 Premier League titles have been won by the team at the top of the table on Christmas Day. The other four have been won by Manchester City. There are basically two options here. Top the table at Christmas. Or be Manchester City. The only teams to outrun City across that period – Chelsea, Manchester United, Leicester and Liverpool – have been the hare in mid-winter as well as in spring.
With this in mind Saturday afternoon looks less like an act of ritual box-ticking, more like a step towards the status of genuine front-runner. With City engaged elsewhere victory would leave Arsenal eight points and Liverpool seven points clear of Pep Guardiola’s serial champions.
Plus there is a question of development here, of matching yourself against your nearest equal. At the end of a week when the Premier League broadcasters seemed genuinely offended by the refusal of Liverpool and Manchester United to dish up a suitably jazzy spectacle, these are two teams that make for a fascinating contrast.
It has been customary to compare Arteta’s methods to those of his former boss at the Etihad. But there are also powerful similarities with the way Klopp has built his Liverpool teams. Both have looked to create a base level of energy in pressing and attacking combinations, and from there to impose a degree of control, defensive solidity and the capacity to rest in possession that are non-negotiable qualities in sustaining a title challenge.
Team-building in this sense is a bit like making a French onion soup. The first stage, the one Liverpool are still in, is to add heat, energy, flavours, mixing and refining, taking wrong turns, adjusting the settings.
After which you do what Arsenal have done this season. You settle and steep and reduce, allowing this substance to become more concentrated, more comfortably itself.
Four years into the age of Mikel, Arsenal are at least a season further down the line than Klopp’s latest iteration. But for both success will rest on finding a balance of control and intensity.
There is a comparison to be drawn between the way Arteta has reined in last season’s greenhorn title challengers, and the way Klopp switched from the thrilling, gung-ho style of Mohamed Salah’s first season to the more mature title-chasing machine that followed.
Certainly this current team are in a more volatile stage. Liverpool are second in Europe’s top five leagues on shots per game, with a total also of 123 shots off-target, more than any other Premier League team. The numbers are fairly wild all round. Seventh most offside team in Europe. Most own goals. Most Premier League red cards. Constant shifts of personnel (eight forward combinations in their past 10 games). This is the abandon stage, the energy stage, the onion-sizzling stage, the part that thrills with its possibilities, while also demanding constant patience.
Arsenal, by contrast, are in the reduction phase. This season has been about control: equal-last in Europe (with City) on shots against, 89th out of 96 when it comes to picking up cards (Arteta is their equal most-booked individual, tied with notorious bruiser Kai Havertz).
After the Brighton game Roberto De Zerbi spoke about his team being run off their feet by Arsenal’s physical intensity and positional discipline, reminiscent of the way Klopp’s most powerful Liverpool teams would exhaust their opponents a couple of seasons back.
Arsenal are settled in the shape now too, with a sense of getting close to the point where changes of personnel and formation will be tactical, tailored to an opponent, rather than a case of searching still for the chemistry.
Arteta has basically played the same team since the 6-0 defeat of Lens, with a Havertz/Rice/Ødegaard midfield plus Saka/Jesus/Martinelli in attack. This thing is still simmering, but it’s thicker, stickier, closer to being finished.
For all that Liverpool remain the masters of control at home, with seven wins and a draw in eight games this season and only five goals conceded, three of those in the wild comeback victory against Fulham. Arsenal have had a 4-3 too, but there have also been seven 1-0s or 2-0s. This is their version of control. Will it be enough?
Whatever happens will of course be shadowed by option two: the City supremacy, a team with the capacity for the kind of run that simply takes the chase out of everyone else’s hands.
*Actual odds of Arsenal or Liverpool winning the title: 5-2 and 11-4. Don’t gamble. Watch the game instead.
