Mikel Arteta's Challenge at Anfield: A Quest for Redemption
Mikel Arteta has a word for what Anfield can do to a footballer. Bajar.
The image he once used in Amazon’s All or Nothing still lingers: a cyclist gliding uphill, smooth and strong, then suddenly – in the space of a kilometre – “boom”. Legs gone. Rhythm shattered. Everything rushing past in a blur.
“For me, that only happened once,” he said. “At Anfield.”
On Sunday, he goes back again, this time to face his childhood friend Andoni Iraola, with Arsenal still smarting from being dumped out of the Carabao Cup by Fleetwood. The setting is familiar, the stakes feel sharper, and the old scars have not fully healed.
Anfield, the old wound
Arteta’s personal history at Liverpool’s home is laced with trauma and frustration. He never won there in five Merseyside derbies with Everton. When he finally did taste victory at Anfield, it came in Arsenal colours in September 2012 – and even that night ended with him in hospital, concussed after a collision with Jordan Henderson. He has called it “the biggest fear of my life”.
Six months later he was in the Arsenal side that won again, Lukas Podolski and Santi Cazorla scoring in a 2-0 victory that felt routine at the time. It has aged into something else entirely. That was Arsenal’s last league win at Anfield.
Since then: 13 Premier League visits, no victories. It equals the club’s worst run away to Liverpool. The only success in that period came in the League Cup in 2020, on penalties, on Arteta’s second visit as a manager. An asterisk of a win in a stadium that usually strips Arsenal bare.
Arteta knows the noise. He tried to inoculate his players against it in November 2021 by blasting “You’ll Never Walk Alone” over the training ground speakers. When the real thing hit, Liverpool won 4-0.
Last season’s defeat, sealed by a late Dominik Szoboszlai free-kick after three successive draws at Anfield, brought a different kind of criticism. Arteta was accused of being too cautious, of never quite releasing the handbrake. Starting Mikel Merino as a No 10 became a symbol of that conservatism. Gary Neville went further, claiming Arsenal lacked “the mentality to go and win big matches at big away grounds”.
That charge will have cut deep. It also has a brutal statistical echo: Arsenal have not beaten Manchester City in the league at the Etihad since 2015, back in Arsène Wenger’s era.
From Fleetwood to the fire
All of that swirls around this trip. So does the embarrassment of Fleetwood.
Losing on penalties to a side 84 places below them, in a stadium holding fewer than 6,000 people, was not part of the plan for a squad built to fight on every front. Arteta went strong there, pairing Kai Havertz and Viktor Gyökeres up front, perhaps to spare Martin Ødegaard some of the burden. Both forwards looked off the pace, and Arsenal left with nothing but bruises and questions.
The injury list does not help. Bukayo Saka is out with a thigh problem. Noni Madueke’s ankle remains a concern. The failed appeal over Max Dowman’s red card means the teenager misses three matches. For a manager who leans heavily on structure and repetition, this is not a week for smooth preparation.
So what does he do at Anfield? He goes back to what has made his Arsenal credible again.
Arteta’s best route to a first league win there as a manager is the one George Graham chose 37 years ago: control, caution, and the courage to be patient.
Echoes of 1989
In May 1989, Graham’s Arsenal arrived at Anfield needing a 2-0 victory to take the title. The narrative demanded a swashbuckling assault. Graham ignored it.
“I told my players to keep things tight in the first half – it was imperative we did not concede,” he recalled on the 20th anniversary of that night. The newspapers screamed for all-out attack. Graham refused. “If Liverpool had scored an early goal it would have been over. But they did very little attacking and played into our hands.”
The rest is folklore. Michael Thomas surging through in stoppage time, the clipped finish, the title ending an 18-year wait. But the foundation was discipline, not chaos.
There was also dignity. Before kick-off, Arsenal’s players ran to all four corners of Anfield, handing flowers to Liverpool fans in a gesture of solidarity after the Hillsborough disaster the previous month. The idea came from Ken Friar, the club’s long-serving director, who died this month. His imprint remains in the club’s sense of itself.
Graham was 44 when he won that title. Arteta was 44 when he lifted his first league crown last season. Both were midfielders, both obsessed with shape and defensive security. “1-0 to the Arsenal” became Graham’s calling card; under Arteta, the chant has been dusted off and modernised.
Since taking over in December 2019, Arteta has overseen 32 1-0 league wins – more than any club except Everton. For all the talk of patterns and positional play, his Arsenal are built on the same granite Graham cherished.
He does not shy away from the comparison.
“Collectively, we acknowledge the importance of defending,” Arteta said last year. “We know that if we excel in that part of the game, the chances and the probabilities to win more matches is going to be very, very high.”
Set-pieces and small margins
Last weekend brought a reminder of that formula. Arsenal’s 2-0 win over Everton at home was routine on the surface, but it carried a small milestone: their first set-piece goal of the season.
Against Liverpool, those details matter. Iraola’s side have been vulnerable from dead balls, still adjusting to his aggressive, high-energy approach. An Arsenal team that stay compact, keep the game slow when it needs to be slow, and strike from corners and free-kicks can turn Anfield’s roar into a murmur.
The temptation, especially after a humiliation like Fleetwood, is to over-correct. To go wild. To prove a point. Arteta’s challenge is to resist that urge and lean into his instincts – the same instincts that delivered a title last season and dragged Arsenal out of their wilderness.
He will not see any upside in the Carabao Cup exit. The competition had already stretched his squad over the past two years, with runs to a semi-final and then a final. The calendar will be lighter now. He will not celebrate that. Managers like him do not celebrate failure.
They respond to it.
On Sunday, in the one stadium that once made him feel the game was racing past in a blur of red shirts, Arteta has a chance to prove he no longer bajar at Anfield – he bends it to his will.
