I re-watched Arsenal’s narrow defeat to Liverpool. This is what i found out. When talking about Out of possession and Man to man press, Gyokeres was good debuting as the press trigger plus we won our duels all over the pitch and denied access to Liverpool pocket players in the first half.
Talking about individual performances, Calafiori was unreal. He won pretty much every 1v1 duel.
Mosquera bullied Ekitike,he tried to pull towards Mosquera but got dominated 9/10 times physically.Rice and Zubi played well by the way . Noni was obviously very good pushing Kerkez all the way back.
The biggest thing i found in my rewatch is how static Gyokeres was. Unable to read space so he could receive passes from midfielders and defenders.
In the 2nd half we punched more balls into him but he was still reactive rather than proactive to them balls into feet and got gobbled up by Van Dijk and Konate.
Arsenal lost the game to Liverpool's in-depth quality. Pretty much no surprise Liverpool do have quality. Curtis Jones found more pockets when he came on freeing up space for Wirtz to penetrate the Gunners midfield.
Also in the second half, Arsenal were so unable to close those spaces as quick as they did in the first half.
The Goal that broke the deadlock came from a lovely VVD line breaker plus Jones finding a lovely pocket thereby attracting a foul from Zubi. Viola!! Szobo FK magic. It happens, and the Gunners are silenced.
