When the season‑crowning montages are spliced into shape a few weeks from now, and depending on how the story shakes down from here, it may be tempting to suggest Aaron Ramsdale saved Arsenal’s league title challenge at Anfield.
In fairness, he seemed to save pretty much everything else on a wild, thrilling afternoon. This was a 2-2 draw that could end up being anything, points saved, points thrown away, corners turned, but which is perhaps best left to spin on its own axis, a self-contained event, elite sport pulled into stirring, ragged, angry shapes, all those patterns and plans and pre-set briefings played out through a mist of rage and ambient energy.
This wasn’t just an incredible game of football. It was two incredible games of football crammed into a single running time. The first of these Arsenal won comfortably, romping into a 2-0 lead and looking like pedigree specimens, cosseted A-listers, a fully functioning machine. The second one they lost, or rather Liverpool won, and won fearsomely, producing a final 50 minutes of clarity, snap, swift passing and furious midfield press.
Arsenal met both versions of the current Liverpool here, the 7-0 home edition and the enfeebled away model. Arsenal were battered and jostled and marched around the place in a headlock, and really should have lost this game. But whatever happens from here – and really, spectacle aside, it was a wonderful afternoon for Manchester City – this was still Ramsdale’s day.
There were two startling saves in stoppage time at the end, with Arsenal by now taking huge lungfuls of air, brains frazzled, muscles flooded with lactic acid. The first was a leaping, full-stretch, dolphin flip past the post, the kind of save that might turn up in a textbook explainer of great footballing heroics. The second was less balletic but even better, a moment of high-spec playground scramble, Ramsdale showing extreme agility to dump himself down at his near post and wrench the ball back off the line as Ibrahima Konaté launched his chest at a cross and seemed certain to score the winning goal.
This was the pattern for the final extended act. Liverpool had 21 shots at goal. And Ramsdale just kept making saves, blocks, catches, clearances. It has perhaps gone under the radar what a fine season he has had, and indeed what a supremely well-rounded goalkeeper he is. Ramsdale can pass and control the ball and add an extra player to the backline, in the modern style. He has a spectacular signature move one on one, what you might call The Squid, all splayed hands and legs, filling the space.
But he can also scrap and scramble and produce those bravura adrenal moments. There was the step inside and leaping claw-away as Mohamed Salah went for the far corner, an example of a keeper reading the play, knowing his man, watching the shift of feet.
There was the block from Darwin Núñez, who ran on to the perfect pass from Salah, looking smooth and elegantly composed as he glided away, then just seeming to enter a parallel world of flailing legs, parping klaxons, seasickness. The finish from Núñez was a doomed prod, but Ramsdale was already spread at his feet, already making this moment look like his moment.
The opening quarter had suggested something very different. The first thing that happened in the game was Gabriel Martinelli not so much going past Trent Alexander-Arnold as walking straight through him. Soon after, Martinelli scored the opener, a goal made by a turn from Bukayo Saka so cute Andy Robertson fell over trying to follow him.
Goal number two came from the same route, Martinelli zooming down the left as Alexander-Arnold plodded back behind him in that familiar, by now almost iconic style, a man always running after some vanished version of the present. The cross was perfect, the header from Gabriel Jesus precise.
But the game changed completely before half‑time, driven mainly by Alexander‑Arnold’s good qualities, as he stepped into midfield and began to unfurl those 30- to 40‑yard passes, horrible searching malevolent things, always dipping and veering and fading into the right space.
Salah pulled a goal back. Anfield began to thunder and reel and barf its strange disconcerting energies across the pitch. And Alexander-Arnold made the difference deep into the second half, nutmegging Oleksandr Zinchenko and producing a lovely back-spun cross for Roberto Firmino to head the equaliser.
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Either side of that Ramsdale had his moments, that rarest of times where a goalkeeper gets to lead from the front. But Arsenal’s weak points were also on show here. First, the lack of real squad depth. Pep Guardiola seems to rotate his high-class centre-backs according to form, whims, opponents. Mikel Arteta has no real choice but to bring in Rob Holding, a game but limited blocker. Granit Xhaka has had a superb season, but he isn’t quite a high-class controlling midfielder. There seemed to be no mechanism to stop this train, take the air out of it, to reassert control.
Arsenal showed other things here, heart and spirit and guts. Thanks to Ramsdale’s brilliance the league title is still in their hands. With the proviso that it is also in City’s hands; and that grip looks pretty unforgiving right now.
