Arsenal take on history and Liverpool voodoo with elusive title in sight

T hese days, for reasons of practicality as much as anything else, you very rarely see a team deciding to switch ends after the pre-match coin toss. But in 2018, in a Champions League quarter-final against Liverpool at Anfield, Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City did. In one of English football’s first recorded instances of a Pep overthink, City decided to switch ends to prevent Liverpool from being able to attack their favoured Kop end during the second half. Genius. Instead, Liverpool banged in three goals in the first 30 minutes, and went on to win 5-1 on aggregate.

Sitting on the City bench that night was assistant coach, Mikel Arteta, who had already endured his own harrowing Anfield experience a few years earlier. In 2014, Arsenal were still chasing that elusive league title when they visited Anfield for a Saturday 12.45pm kick-off. By 1.05pm they were 4-0 down, their gameplan in ruins, a sensory overload of red shirts and white noise having temporarily interrupted the function of their limbs. Arteta was Arsenal’s captain that day and would testify after the 5-1 defeat that he had never seen Arsène Wenger so angry.

A few years later, Arteta would explain the sensation to Marca. “You say: ‘I don’t know what’s going on, stop the game please, because I don’t know where I am,’” he remembered. “At Anfield you can concede five without knowing. There is a word we use in Spain in cycling, pájara, when a cyclist looks amazing, then in one kilometre he goes boom, and looks like he’s struggling again. Suddenly I could only see red shirts flying around. The game is passing over me and I can’t react. I can’t do it emotionally, physically I can’t cope, everything goes too fast. I only had that feeling once in my career, and it was