Arsenal Have Lost Their Edge and With It May Go Their Place at the Top Table

Some promise, a collapse of bewildering speed, followed by a recovery that ended up not being quite good enough but at least meant that the final result wasn’t as big an embarrassment as it might have been. For Arsenal, Sunday’s 4-3 defeat to Liverpool was entirely characteristic.

There must have been hundreds of fans who missed Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain’s goal, either because they were too busy berating manager Arsene Wenger from behind the dugout or because they were watching—perhaps even arguing with—those who were. And in turn the England international’s goal punctured the rising bubble of anger.

There was booing at the final whistle, but it was nowhere near as intense as it would have been had the score remained 4-1. But the truth is, irrespective of those two late goals, this was dismal from Arsenal.

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Liverpool, as Jurgen Klopp acknowledged in his post-match press-conference, weren’t even that good. For the first half, in fact, they were poor, tentative. The Reds manager accused them of lacking conviction in the hard-pressing style he had called for.

No Arsenal player is ever going to be taken aback by his manager’s radicalism. When Wenger arrived in English football in 1996, he was exciting and different. He cleared away the booze culture, changed his players’ diets and produced a side that was noticeably quicker and stronger than his opponents. Beautiful football came in parallel to that.

The two decades since have seen him trace the familiar path into conservatism. Everybody knows Arsenal will play a 4-2-3-1, which, in truth, Arsenal have almost always played even if we used to call it a 4-4-2 when it was Dennis Bergkamp in the Mesut Ozil role, tucking behind a central striker.

The formation and the style were as wearily familiar as the capitulation in the first 18 minutes of the second half, when Arsenal were blown away just as they had been in the first 20 minutes at Anfield in February 2014 and as they have been at various times in recent seasons by Barcelona and Bayern Munich: press them hard enough and they will wilt.

In his television interview, Wenger was tetchy. By the time he got to the written press conference, he just seemed tired. Then came his startling admission that his players were not “ready physically."

"It is an impossible situation to get players back from the Euros and prepare,” he said. "You are in a catch-22 situation with the Euros, whether to give players a rest who need it. They are not ready to play this sort of game and get injured, like [Aaron] Ramsey, or you give them a rest and not have them for the start.”

It’s true that if you select your statistics carefully enough, Arsenal can seem hard done to by the Euros. No Premier League side had more players in the squads that got to the semi-finals than the Gunners' four (yes, Ramsey was suspended and didn’t play, but he was training and there’s a mental strain to being at a tournament; he wasn’t resting).

But then if you include the quarter-finals, Arsenal were less badly affected than Tottenham Hotspur, Manchester United and, yes, Liverpool, all of whom had five. The Anfield club, it may also be noted, also had five players in the England squad to the Gunners' one.

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Other teams cope, but then other teams have functioning squads. The after-effects of Euro 2016 put particular pressure on Arsenal because they have so many injuries: seven now, if you include Ramsey and Alex Iwobi, who both succumbed on Sunday. You don’t have to be Raymond Verheijen to look at Arsenal’s perpetual injury crisis and wonder if something may be amiss in their training.

Yet even that isn’t entirely an excuse: Liverpool also have seven injuries to first-team players, all of them sustained before Sunday. When Arsenal announced the signing of Granit Xhaka at the end of last season to add to the January acquisition of Mohamed Elneny, there was the thought that they might at last have a squad with realistic title aspirations.

All that was needed was a high-class centre-forward—and there was talk of Alexandre Lacazette, per the Guardian's Ed Aarons—and a commanding central defender. Instead they brought in Rob Holding, a 20-year-old defender from Bolton Wanderers, and Takuma Asano, a 21-year-old forward from Sanfrecce Hiroshima. Both may go on to be excellent players, but the promise of jam tomorrow is wearing thin at Arsenal.

The squad is already stuffed with players like Theo Walcott and Oxlade-Chamberlain, yesterday’s next big things, Peter Pans living in a Neverland of eternal potential.

Wenger protests that there’s no value in the market, that prices have gone up, but increasingly he sounds like a pensioner bemoaning the price of milk.

A figure of £30 million is just what a decent player costs these days: That is the same market Arsenal use to justify setting the highest ticket prices in the country. Those prices aren’t going to go down.

As Rory Smith pointed out for ESPN FC, Wenger seems to be living in the past, ignoring the vast television deal that has inflated transfer fees, to pursue a redundant economic model.

None of that is new; it’s just more so. For years Arsenal have seemed afflicted by injuries more than anybody else, have failed to make the additions to their squad that were manifestly needed and have failed to turn their promising young talent into outstanding footballers.

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What felt different on Sunday was the way Arsenal were outgunned. It’s happened before, but not to a team who finished eighth last season that, by their manager’s own admission, wasn’t anywhere near their best.

In those early minutes of the second half, Liverpool were faster, stronger, more intense and smarter. They did to Arsenal what the Arsenal of a dozen years ago did to others.

For years it’s been apparent Arsenal had never satisfactorily replaced Patrick Vieira, that they needed somebody of pace and determination in midfield to rattle the opposition. Xhaka may be that player, but even if he is, there are major deficiencies elsewhere.

Arsenal will tick over. That’s what they do. They have too many good players to be terrible and the personalities in the squad are such that a meltdown into toxicity such as happened at Chelsea last season is unlikely. But the edge has gone, tactically and psychologically.

Collapse has been predicted for years but, with more teams likely to be competing at the Premier League summit than ever before, this really might be the season when Arsenal slip out of the top four.

*All quotes and information obtained firsthand unless otherwise indicated.