Arsenal were excellent at Anfield on Sunday, and they still needed Andy Madley and Stuart Attwell to look the other way. Both of those things happened. If you only want one of them to be true, you're just rooting.
Start with what they actually did, because it's worth admiring. Arsenal went to Anfield and held Liverpool to zero shots on target, the first time Liverpool has failed to register one in a home top-flight game. David Raya finished the afternoon without having to make a save. Liverpool had 56% of the ball, 17 shots, 71 entries into the final third and 33 crosses, and all of it crashed into a wall. Kai Havertz settled it in the 16th minute, Declan Rice finding the back post after Martin Odegaard pounced on a loose Alisson pass to start the move. That ended a 14-year wait for a win at the ground and sent Arsenal three points clear at the top, 24 points from nine matches as of this weekend, ahead of Manchester City.
Jamie Carragher called it "outstanding" to come to Anfield and concede nothing on target under that kind of pressure. Gary Neville reached for "defensive masterclass" and compared Arsenal's compactness to a Mourinho side. Carragher went further and called Rice the best midfielder in the Premier League by a long way. On the evidence of 90 minutes of game management, none of that is wrong. Rice ran the middle of the pitch and the back line barely flinched.
The word "masterclass" starts doing work it shouldn't right about here. Jurrien Timber grabbed a fistful of Alexander Isak's shirt inside the box as Isak tried to attack a cross. No penalty from Madley, no intervention from Attwell. The reason given, essentially, is that Isak stayed on his feet. Andoni Iraola said the quiet part out loud: "The Isak one is a clear penalty... because he doesn't go on the floor, you're not going to give it? That's the problem we have with the game." Virgil van Dijk called it a clear penalty. Former referee Dermot Gallagher said Timber "has taken a big chance and has got lucky." Keith Hackett, who used to run PGMOL, went further still: Timber "had a fistful of the top," and had the penalty been given, Timber should have walked for denying a goalscoring chance.
A credentialed former refereeing chief thinks Timber should have been sent off had the penalty been given. He wasn't, because the officials got a big call wrong, and Liverpool's attack was wasteful to the point of self-harm anyway. Florian Wirtz hit the bar. Alexis Mac Allister headed a free chance over. The one shot on target was a tame Bradley Barcola effort in stoppage time. A team that turns that much territory into a single limp shot doesn't get to call the result a robbery, but the winner doesn't get to pretend the officiating didn't tilt the floor either.
There's a real double standard here too. When a smaller side sits deep and frustrates a giant, the pundit class calls it parking the bus and sneers. When Arsenal do it at Anfield, it's a masterclass and a tactical education. Same game, different blazer.
Grinding out 1-0 at Anfield is what title teams do, and Arsenal look like a title team. Rice was genuinely world-class. The discipline was elite too. But the people who decided this result was in doubt are Madley and Attwell, who missed an obvious shirt-pull despite the number of cameras available to catch it, and a Liverpool front line that treated 17 shots like a personal dare. Call the performance brilliant. Just don't scrub the asterisk off while you do it.
