Who needs strikers anyway? Before kick-off this match was billed both as a test of Arsenal's worthiness as Premier league frontrunners and also as a rather pointed public examination of Arsène Wenger's enduring tactical puritanism: a meeting of the team with a glut, a debauchery even of soft-shoed midfield creators against the most fluent attacking duo currently operating in the Premier League. If this was the case then by the end there was only one clear winner. Arsenal's midfield scored twice in the opening hour through Santi Cazorla and Aaron Ramsey, both goals beautifully executed, to complete a 2-0 win. While, for all their endeavour, the first real effort at goal by a Liverpool striker came in the 69th minute, by which stage the match had been decided by Arsenal's fluency and yes, that too tenacity.From the start there was a crackle of unusually boisterous excitement around the Emirates on an evening given an extra sense of event glamour of those unusually brilliant white lights, and by fact Chelsea's defeat earlier in the day had transformed this into a meeting of the Premier League's top two teams. If Liverpool's fate here was always likely to be in the hands of the two players who had, before this game, scored 14 of their team's 17 league goals, then there was an agreeable sense of contrast from the start. Arsenal, of course, have a weakness where Liverpool are strong, not to mention a feast of attacking midfield riches where Liverpool are in a state of transition. Wenger has tried to buy both Daniel Sturridge and Luis Suárez on at least one occasion. Here his backup to Olivier Giroud amounted to a) Niclas Bendtner, and b) we'll think of something.
This is in part a tactical thing. Arsenal's resources are deployed to feed their strengths, embodied best here in the first half by Santi Cazorla who not only scored the opening goal but emerged as the dominant attacking figure on the pitch. The goal itself might almost have been designed in a Saturday Wenger-ism workshop. It came via a thrust down the right, Bacary Sagna's run and cross crowned with a moment of supreme technique from Cazorla. First the shortest man on the pitch headed against the left-hand post; then he reacted quickest to spank the bouncing ball with both feet off the ground back across and into the corner. Message from the management: no strikers were involved in the making of this goal.
Cazorla continued to roam between the lines from left to right, as Arsenal's floating attacking midfield-three repeatedly pressed a Liverpool back line that often looked uncomfortable trying to play the Rodgers way. At times with the ball at his feet Martin Skrtel resembles a nightclub bouncer trying to tap dance. For all that Liverpool will always have goals in them and it was simply the threat of Sturridge-Suárez that created the first real chance of the game, as Arsenal's defence parted like a pair of theatrical curtains in response to both strikers roaming wide, allowing Jordan Henderson a clear run on goal. Never mind running from his knees, simply being able to run with the ball at all backwards, on his hands would have been enough. Instead Henderson stumbled and scuffed wide.
In the opening minutes Mikel Arteta stayed close to Suárez when he dropped deep, albeit Liverpool's chief forager remains an almost impossible player to mark to a plan if only because, when he plays well, it feels like there isn't really a plan at all. He is in effect a one-man footballing improv theatre act. Watching him take the ball you get the feeling at that precise moment he has a flickering mental picture of at least five different outrageously bold scenarios the rabidly scampering dribble, the overhead backheel, the street-football barge-through competing for his attention.
In spite of which at times in the first half Liverpool resembled what they are a work in progress and what they are in their worst moments, a team of two high-class strikers, a venerable captain and some other people. Brendan Rodgers reacted by bringing on Liverpool's own highly gifted deep-lying attacking midfielder, Philippe Coutinho but Arsenal still looked by far the more fluent team and just before the hour it was midfield two, strikers nil, as Ramsey scored the second. It was another brilliantly worked all-midfield affair, Ramsey taking Mesut Özil's pass and allowing the ball to bounce twice before half-volleying past Simon Mignolet. Poor defending perhaps, but a product too of Arsenal's relentlessly fluid midfield creativity, a threat that comes on days like this from so many angles the idea of a striking partnership starts to look a little reductively old hat. Cazorla left the field to a standing ovation: Arsenal have a torrid run of fixtures to come, but it is clear where their strengths lie going into it.
