Guardiola and Arteta now live rent free in each other’s heads; it’s only good news for Liverpool

We’re going to level with you, we still haven’t really recovered from what we saw Pep Guardiola do at Arsenal yesterday.

There was just something deeply discombobulating about seeing captain tiki-taka himself descend so far into the depths of low-block-and-counter that until the desperate last few post-equaliser minutes there wasn’t even any longer the ‘counter’ part. Even late-career Jose Mourinho’s most despicable sides still occasionally actually try to score goals.

Watching Guardiola chuck a series of large centre-backs and even larger central midfielders on to the pitch while withdrawing anyone with the propensity for anything fun or inventive at all was just so jarring. Just so out of place, like when you’d see one of your teachers at the shops or on holiday.

Hey, deeply withdrawn flat back five with another table-football bank of four right in front of it, what are you doing here?

The only consolation is that Guardiola himself appears to have derived no joy at all from the experience either, not even of the nihilistic, miserabilist kind that has consumed Mourinho on his decade-long descent from sh*thousing manager to sh*tposting meme.

“I suffer. I don’t like it. I want the ball away, away. I want it close to [David] Raya not close to Gigi [Donnarumma]. But when the opponent does good things, you have to accept it and improve.”

In a way, it’s a relief that City didn’t quite manage to hold on. Arsenal fans claiming the Forced City To Play Sufferball Trophy and the inevitable instantaneous avalanche of Worra Trophy retorts would have been just too much even for us to bear, and we live for the nonsense.

There is still nonsense, mind.

Still, though. He’s had a lot to say about it, has Pep. And the key point throughout has been that Arsenal forced him to do it.

“We were so close, we were resilient and I would prefer to play in a certain way but in 10 years we played against a lot of teams who defend deep, deep, deep.

“Sometimes you play against a team who are better in that way and you have to survive in that way, you have to accept it and we did it.”

The thing is…we’re really not sure that’s actually true. Did Arsenal really do that much to force Guardiola into such extreme defensive measures? Into ending up with a team comprising Savinho and nine centre-backs and DMs trying to push for a winner after all the defending didn’t work?

We’re really not sure Arsenal did anything like enough to provoke such an extreme, primeval survival response from Guardiola. There is a pretty clear consensus that Mikel Arteta himself went too cautious, again.

Guardiola for his part surely got it just about right in the first half, didn’t he? That was already a marked shift in approach from a manager who has achieved stunning success in three countries with a possession-based approach.

In the first half at the Emirates, Guardiola set his team up to control the game without having to control the ball. It was working rather well. It was a more circumspect approach than we’re used to seeing from City, but one that tipped a hat to a side that had overwhelmed them 5-1 on this ground last season. It was an understandable adjustment and adaptation for a fiendishly difficult away game.

And it worked rather wonderfully. City invited Arsenal on, held them largely at arm’s length, and took devastating advantage of a counter-attacking opportunity in which Arsenal had over-committed and left themselves with just one centre-back trying to defend two opponents. That’s a thankless task even if one of those opponents isn’t Erling Actual Haaland, which on this occasion it very much was.

The misguided approach at this stage was undoubtedly that of Arsenal, who had failed to predict this more measured City approach and set up in their usual safety-first, cautious-to-a-fault big-game mindset.

Sure, Arteta slightly changed course in the second half but only to correct those initial errors in response to the fact City’s own gameplan was working so well. There really didn’t feel any pressing need for City to do anything very different themselves.

They were not overwhelmed, they retained that counter-attack threat and could very easily have scored a second goal themselves before Guardiola panicked and went almost sarcastically defensive.

It was like he had some wild urge to show the world that he really could do something different, if he were so inclined.

We know Guardiola can be prone to overthinking things for big games, but these things usually happen with rogue starting line-ups after he’s had too long with his own big-brain thoughts in his office on a Friday afternoon. Not with profoundly excessive in-game changes like this.

Watching both managers attempt to second-guess the other in a series of tit-for-tat changes – even in the very last moments of the game Arteta felt the need to perform evasive manoeuvres of his own by bringing on another centre-back to quell any possible set-piece threat from what was by this time a City team comprised almost entirely of absolute giants – it became hard to shift the notion that they have simply now played out too many matches alongside and against each other.

Guardiola and Arteta appear to have achieved some kind of singularity where each man lives rent-free inside the other’s head.

We’re not sure it’s at all healthy for either of them. But it definitely is for Liverpool.