Arteta can take inspiration from George Graham to expunge painful Anfield memories

Mikel Arteta used a Spanish word to describe what it felt like to be helpless at Anfield while playing for Everton in 2011: bajar. “It’s when a cyclist is going up and looks amazing, then in one kilometre he goes ‘boom’ and he’s struggling again,” he said in Amazon’s All or Nothing documentary. “The game was going well and then suddenly I could only see red shirts flying around. The game is passing all over me and I cannot react. I only had that feeling in my career once, and it was at Anfield.”

Given Arteta’s record at Liverpool, Sunday’s showdown with his childhood friend Andoni Iraola – five days after Arsenal were dumped out of the Carabao Cup by Fleetwood – could be expected to fill him with dread. Arteta finally tasted victory there as a player with Arsenal in September 2012, after five failed attempts in the Merseyside derby, but ended up spending the night in hospital with concussion after colliding with Jordan Henderson in an incident he has described as “the biggest fear of my life”.

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Arteta was part of the Arsenal side that won at Anfield again six months later thanks to goals from the new signings Lukas Podolski and Santi Cazorla. That was the last time the club triumphed there in the Premier League. They have not won at Anfield for 13 league matches, equalling the club’s worst run at Liverpool. Arsenal’s one victory at Liverpool in the interim came in the League Cup on penalties in 2020 on Arteta’s second visit as a manager.

The Spaniard tried to prepare his players for a trip to Anfield in November 2021 by playing You’ll Never Walk Alone over the training ground speakers but that ended in a 4-0 defeat. He was criticised after last season’s loss in late August, when Dominik Szoboszlai’s late free-kick ended a sequence of three Arsenal draws at Liverpool, for a perceived failure to take off the handbrake, having started Mikel Merino as his No 10. Gary Neville went as far as to say Arsenal lacked “the mentality to go and win big matches at big away grounds”, an assertion that will have hurt Arteta but does have credence: they have not beaten Manchester City in the Premier League at the Etihad since 2015 under Arsène Wenger.

Arteta will be keen to disprove such perceptions, especially after Arsenal struggled so badly against a team 84 places below them in the pyramid in a stadium that holds fewer than 6,000 people. The strikers Kai Havertz and Viktor Gyökeres surprisingly started in tandem at Fleetwood, presumably in an attempt to lighten the load on Martin Ødegaard, although both look badly out of form. Bukayo Saka is out with a thigh injury, there are concerns over Noni Madueke’s ankle and Arsenal’s failed appeal over Max Dowman’s red card rules out the teenager for three matches.

With that in mind, Arteta’s best chance of beating Liverpool is probably by taking the cautious approach that has served him so well and was the cornerstone of last season’s Premier League title triumph. He can take inspiration from one of the most famous nights in Arsenal’s history 37 years ago when George Graham’s side arrived at Anfield needing a 2-0 victory to be champions.

“I told my players to keep things tight in the first half – it was imperative we did not concede,” said Graham in an interview to mark the 20th anniversary of that dramatic finale to the 1988-89 season, when Michael Thomas scored in stoppage time to end Arsenal’s 18-year wait for the title. “The papers were saying we’d have to attack from the off, but I was adamant that was wrong. If Liverpool had scored an early goal it would have been over. But they did very little attacking and played into our hands.”

Before the 1989 game, Arsenal’s players ran to all four corners of the ground to hand flowers to Liverpool fans as a show of sympathy after the Hillsborough disaster the previous month – an idea proposed by their longstanding director Ken Friar, who died this month.

Graham and Arteta were 44 when they won their first league titles and the similarities do not end there. The former Scotland midfielder, who scored almost 80 goals for Arsenal and helped them win the Double in 1971, was known for his emphasis on defending as a manager and “1-0 to the Arsenal” became synonymous with Graham, especially towards the end of his reign. Arteta has revived that tradition since he took over in December 2019, recording 1-0 victories 32 times in the Premier League, more than any club apart from Everton.

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Arsenal scored their first set-piece goal of the season in a routine 2-0 win at home to Everton last Saturday and targeting Liverpool’s weakness from set plays while keeping things tight at the other end could be the most effective tactic against a team who have been finding their feet under Iraola in recent weeks.

“Collectively, we acknowledge the importance of defending,” said Arteta last year when asked about comparisons between his team and Graham’s. “We know that if we excel in that part of the game, the chances and the probabilities to win more matches is going to be very, very high.”

Arsenal flew back to London after losing to Fleetwood on penalties in a shootout that will have revived bad memories of May’s Champions League final defeat by Paris Saint-Germain.

The Carabao Cup has stretched Arteta’s squad in the past two seasons, when they reached first the semi-finals then the final, so that is one potential positive from their elimination – not that the ultra-competitive Spaniard would agree. For him, the only way to respond to the most embarrassing night of his managerial career will be to follow in Graham’s footsteps on Sunday.