5 Conclusions on Arsenal 1-1 Man City: Liverpool win as Arteta plays safe and Pep goes Full Mourinho

 Hands up who thought they’d live to see Pep Guardiola go Full Mourinho? It wasn’t even low-block-and-counter by the end at the Emirates. It was low-block-and-block. And it nearly worked.

Hard to shake the idea that however relieved Arsenal might be with that exquisite late equaliser, the real winners of this one are a couple of hundred miles to the north-west.

1. This is precisely what Arsenal fans were worried about when the fixture list came out in the summer. To be entirely clear from the very beginning, the dark murmurings that this formed some part of The Conspiracy were always bunk.

But the concern was real and not without merit: that Arsenal could with only a couple of very minor errors find their title challenge in fairly deep early trouble.

And here we are. One narrow defeat to a late worldie at Anfield and one slightly curious home draw with Man City later, and before September is out Arsenal find themselves five points adrift of the champions and playing catch-up against a team yet to drop a single point.

Spread these fixtures out more evenly across a season, and 10 points from five games against United (away), Leeds, Liverpool (away), Forest and City would feel broadly fine. Arsenal must now convince themselves that remains the case.

2. Gary Neville came straight in with the inevitable ‘Liverpool the winners’ conclusion after this game ended all-square, and the trite glibness of the observation shouldn’t deflect from the apparent accuracy. Or stop us from making the same conclusion ourselves. The lateness of Arsenal’s equaliser after an afternoon of intense frustration means they perhaps in the end leave the Emirates happier with the point than City, who sacrificed everything up to and including their entire identity in an attempt to cling on to a win that would have meant so much.

But any result here other than an Arsenal win was always one whose biggest positive impact would potentially be felt a couple of hundred miles away at Anfield.

Today’s results here and elsewhere leave Liverpool as the only team left with a 100 per cent home record even at this early stage. It highlights the unpredictability and vulnerability absolutely everyone else has displayed in the first 50 games of this Premier League season, and does leave everyone else with plenty to worry about.

If Liverpool can ease clear like this in their current form, what happens if and when they stop dozing off the second they take a 2-0 lead? It doesn’t bear thinking about.

3. While acknowledging that different game styles appeal to different people – one man’s riotously entertaining goalfest is another man’s unacceptable defensive disasterclass, after all – we’re still going to stick our neck out and say we’ve seen some far more entertaining games between these two in recent seasons.

But this was one that crackled with tension throughout. A lot of that tension seemed to come from the stands. Not for the first time, we find ourselves wondering whether the Emirates is a particularly fun place to play these big games.

There’s a suffocating angst about proceedings in any game like this that ends up being close, which by definition is quite a lot of them. The frustration at misplaced passes, the frequent urging – particularly notable today with a particularly vocal exponent apparently sat pretty close to Gary Neville – for Arsenal to play the ball forward and take the game to City far more than they were doing.

Bubbling fan frustrations are not unique to Arsenal or the Emirates, of course, but there’s an oppressive, deadening feel to it on days like this.

It’s a big part of why the Celebration Police are always so interested in goings on here, of course. Arsenal’s series of second-place finishes have heightened the sense that every game, every goal, every refereeing decision is of gargantuan importance to the whole narrative, and is treated as such.

We’re not having a go, it just seems exhausting.

4. One thing that is for sure is that had City held on for victory here and received so much as a paragraph of praise when Pep Guardiola spent the bulk of the second half in a truly shocking to witness low-block-and-counter tribute to Jose Mourinho, then Arsenal heads would have been on Mars given the criticism their own near sarcastically cautious big-game approach continues to attract and will again today.

5. It seems reasonable to say Mikel Arteta got it wrong here with his initial team selection, and that he can receive only partial credit for correcting course at half-time. Taking this very first opportunity to prefer the meat-and-potatoes stylings of Mikel Merino and Leandro Trossard over Ebere Eze in a big game felt like something that was, if anything for me, Clive, just a little bit too Arteta.

Eze could and should have started in place of one of those two, and Arsenal would have been a better side for it. As the second half showed. Eze wasn’t flawless by any stretch, most memorably when nearly smashing the ball off Declan Rice into his own net for some reason after Haaland spurned a rare second-half chance for City to put the game to bed, but the fact it was his raking high-tariff pass from deep that finally cracked open Pep Guardiola’s Blue Wall deep into injury time should not be lost on anyone.

Sometimes picking the safest option is in its own way the biggest gamble of all.