Three quickfire goals from Adam Lallana, Coutinho and Sadio Mane at the start of the second period established a three-goal advantage for Liverpool. The home team answered through the substitute, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, and Calum Chambers but the deficit proved insurmountable and his woes were deepened by hamstring and thigh injuries to Aaron Ramsey and Alex Iwobi respectively.
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“Scoring four goals is wonderful, conceding three is the opposite of emotions”, he said.
“We can always score goals and we can defend much better”. Arsenal’s young centre-back pairing of Chambers and debutant Rob Holding had been keeping the visitors quiet but a misplaced pass out of defence from the former saw Firmino and Coutinho combine to set-up Georginio Wijnaldum, but the Dutchman’s shot was weak and Cech saved comfortably.
“It looked like after half an hour, “oh, another Liverpool day”, but then we strike back and that’s very, very important”.
“Philippe got us back in the game with a brilliant goal, to come in level”. For this moment we switched off the machines for a second. The second half showed Wenger’s shortcomings as opposed to Klopp’s strengths as he took the game out of Arsenal’s hands.
Per Mertesacker, Gabriel and Danny Welbeck are all nursing long-term injuries while Mesut Ozil, Laurent Koscielny and Olivier Giroud all sat out the Liverpool game due to a lack of match fitness.
The Nigeria worldwide remains a doubt for next weekend’s clash away to reigning champions Leicester City at the King Power Stadium.
“We are not stupid”, he said.
“It was too easy to play between our rows and in the spaces we gave them, the formation we had chosen was to close those spaces and what we did was open spaces”.
“Then the manager said a lot of things we needed to improve on in the second half and I felt we did that”, said Henderson, who praised his teammates for how they “came out firing in the second-half” and “got some brilliant goals”. “If they can not get that striker, they should play Alexis Sanchez with Olivier Giroud”.
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BBC pundit Garth Crooks reckons Liverpool could get relegated – yes, you did read that right – unless they sell left-back Alberto Moreno.
