Man City can bust atmosphere myth vs Arsenal but Etihad questions won't go away

Mikel Arteta famously made his Arsenal players prepare for Liverpool by training while loudspeakers blasted out You'll Never Walk Alone.

The former Everton player and Manchester City assistant had already endured enough misery at Anfield to last a lifetime, and the thinking was that the more comfortable his players were with the atmosphere they expected to get the more chance they had of winning. They lost 4-0, although they are now unbeaten in their last three trips.

There's an obvious joke for how Arteta will prepare Arsenal for the Etihad, but amid the ongoing tedious swipes at City's atmosphere anyone who watched the fixture last season saw the visitors blown away by the noise that swept all over them. Arriving as title leaders, within minutes of kick-off the Gunners were run ragged and a furious Arteta had to admit after the game that they never recovered.

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There's an argument that the atmosphere for Real Madrid at home last season was the best, and the La Liga giants certainly felt it. Federico Valverde described the Etihad as the toughest stadium he had played in on the back of it, while Madrid newspaper Marca described it as 'the harshest Madrid had encountered in many years, a complete trap'.

It certainly was noisy, although the matches shortly before it against Bayern and Arsenal felt more partisan, more visceral. They felt like as well as the players were ready to turn predators into prey, so were 55,000 around the pitch.

A quirk of the Manchester weather gave the Arsenal match the edge over Bayern as well, with a massive banner prepared by the 1894 group for the Champions League game abandoned due to