Happy Monday party people – how we all doing? Feeling chipper after another win? Or are you like me and already becoming a bit fraught with the idea of going to Anfield to play the manifestation of a bi-polar football team that is Liverpool Football Club?

This one coming up on the radar is one that, for some time, I’ve thought that if we’re going to start to see the beginning of City clawing back any points on us, it was going to be this coming weekend. We talked about it towards the end of the Same old Arsenal pod that I was on last night as this game coming up is one that I’ve got plenty of scars for; we always seem to get tonked up there and haven’t won in 11 years, which is why I’m expecting the same again on Sunday. But more than just Sunday, I worry about what that does for the team and the pressure if/when we lose/drop points at Liverpool over the Easter weekend. The good thing is that this team has shown that it has the resilience to recover from blips; just look at the defeat to City which was preceded by the unfair draw at home to Brentford and the defeat away at Everton, where we looked to be on the rocks only to then embark on the seven game winning run that has seen us in the position we are in now where we’re eight points clear  having played a game more than City.

My hope is that this talk about this Arsenal team being ‘different’ is proved at one of the hardest grounds to play at in the country. Liverpool look a shadow of themselves this season and they were an embarrassment against City this last weekend, but at home they appear to be a slightly different animal and we are going to have to do something that we haven’t done in a long time to pick up anything there.

Look at me, we’re only on Monday and I’ve already moved on from the basking of a 4-1 victory over Leeds, to being concerned with a match that is six days from now. Usually I try to eek out a little more time on the weekend-just-gone result, but my mind is firmly looking at that Liverpool game because of the sheer gravity of it for us. We were asked if we think Arsenal win the league if we beat Liverpool away on Sunday on the pod. I hesitated for a bit but then said I think we might. I didn’t watch it but apparently even Gary Neville said it yesterday, referring to how Sir Alex Ferguson used to say that if you win the game at Anfield at this time of the season, you usually win the league. If players like that, who have won what he has won, make comments like that, it only underlines the challenge we have ahead of us. Regardless of the form Liverpool are in, they are still formidable at home and have won nine of their 13 games and only lost once all season, including beating City at Anfield. They’ve scored 34 goals in 13 matches, meaning at home they score an average of over two-and-a-half goals per match. Players know how tough it is to go there and for our players next weekend, having lost 4-0 there last season, this will be no different.

Of course there are so many more matches to play after that game and we could just as easily slip up away to West Ham as we do away to Liverpool at the weekend, but that game at Anfield looms like a psychological millstone around supporters’ heads like mine, so if we got anything up there it would feel like a huge obstacle that the team has overcome.

More to be said in the coming days as we lead up to that game.

As for other footballing news, it broke whilst we were recording that Graham Potter had been sacked and we had a little chat about it. He seems like a good coach, he obviously achieved good things at Brighton, but in hindsight it was always doomed to failure at Chelsea. Todd Boehly brought in a ‘project’ manager and then preceded to approach the running of Chelsea with a ‘Galactico’ policy of hoovering up loads of players and chucking them at the manager and expecting some kind of magic to happen. It clearly wasn’t. The hope I have now is that they don’t decide to hire a proper manager that gets this team working, just as we play them at the end of this month. That would be just our luck, that’s for sure.

At least we’ve already played Leicester and the Scum, so there isn’t any worry about the dreaded ‘new manager bounce’ there for us. But we do have to make sure that we do our job and those jobs are looking increasingly more difficult with each passing game. There are nine cup finals left, we have a week to prepare for each of them, so we need to be ready and prepare well for every single match that we have coming. It’s going to be even more stressful every time the weekend comes, it is going to get tight, but it is at least a fight that we are in; we haven’t been able to say that for decades so that is something.

Other than that there is not a lot going on, so I’ll put a pin on today’s musings (or mainly worries ahead of Liverpool away next weekend), and catch you all in the morrow.

Have a good’un.