I was round my parents yesterday for the weekend and as I was starting the prep for Sunday roast with the old man I decided to put the game on between Liverpool and Wolves in the second half. It was 2-0, I wasn’t expecting anything other than a slow canter towards three points for the Scousers, so there wasn’t really anything to lose.

I watched from the moment Jota essentially dived in the box and got a penalty, only for it to be rightly ruled out for VAR. Quite why he wasn’t booked for simulation is beyond me, but Liverpool do get their fair share of decisions, so we have to accept it really. But I did see a pretty decent Wolves goal from Cunha (he looks like a player – somebody should think  about putting in a bid…) to at least make the last 20+ minutes interesting and have Liverpool players, coaching staff and fans look a little edgy.

I still think they’ll go on to win the title, but if we can keep nudging at them until April time, then that will be a phenomenal effort from an Arsenal team who have been on its knees through injuries this season. Let’s not go over old ground re: lack of attacking transfers, but the fact that players have been forced to play so frequently because of injuries, which then has an impact on their ability to maintain fitness, has meant that not only are we up against it from a points overhaul perspective, but a personnel perspective we are too. And the effort these Arsenal players are putting in has been phenomenal. This season Man City have suffered some crucial injuries to Rodri, De Bruyne, etc and the result is they are battling for top four. I had a look at last season for Liverpool and, if you count the players that are ‘first team’ players that picked up injuries, I counted on TransferMarkt and collectively through their whole squad they had 181 absences across the Premier League season. Across 23 players and on a 38 game Premier League season they missed an average of 4.8 (let’s call it five) players for every game. So to be fair to the Scousers they had a pretty rough time of it from an injury perspective and the result was that they started falling away from a title challenge around about match week 33 to 34 (I had a look on the Premier League website here).

How does that start up with us this season? Well, we are up to match week 25 and we’ve picked up a total of 122 number of absences across the squad and again, I haven’t counted some of those under-21 players as I’m focusing on the first teamers. Our absences work out at 4.9 (so again, let’s round up to five players injured) for the season. It’s difficult to project forward but we know that Jesus, Kai and Tomiyasu won’t be returning, so that’s at least an additional 39 absences to take us up to 161. If Martinelli and Saka don’t return until after the international break that would be an additional eight matches (four games, two players absent = eight) and brings us up to 169.

There’s a fair bit of numbers in there, but the crux of the matter is that we’re having the same season that Liverpool had last season.

Are there any differences? Well, you can certainly argue that they picked up more injuries to squad players than injured players. Their big long-term injuries came in the shape of Conor Bradley (who plays understudy to Trent), Joel Matip (who rotates with Konate), Thiago (who is basically like our Tomiyasu) and Jota (who is a rotation option that you’d probably say is like us missing a Trossard, for example). I certainly think our long-term absences have been on the more “most important players in the team” side than Liverpool last season, but you can’t argue that they didn’t suffer at all and to be fair to them they took it until April before they started to fall away.

There is all the 115 Charges FC Elephant in the room. They were still in their pomp and had they have had the same season they had this season in 2023/24, I suspect that we would have found ourselves in a similar position to Liverpool i.e. with a bit of a buffer. Even if we wouldn’t have found that, we would have been confident of chasing down a Liverpool side that looks like it ran out of steam as it chased down four trophies. City did what City usually do; this season they have fallen away and it has enabled Liverpool to feel a bit of breathing space between them and the rest of the chasing pack. That’s what we didn’t get last season as it reached its climax.

Liverpool are also three points better off than they were at match week 25 last season. We are two points worse. So when you look at those numbers, it feels like there is certainly an opportunity for us based on last season’s trend. The only challenge we have is that we have so many key attacking absences right now. If we had Kai back and Saka/Martinelli a week or two away, I’d be feeling a little bit more buoyant. But with those absences, plus a game at Anfield that will come at the end of the season (we NEVER win at Anfield…), it just feels a little different to last season. Even if the numbers don’t look exactly the same.

So for me I think that has to be our target: Stay in the discussion as long as we possibly can. Looking at the immediate future that means West Ham, Forest, United and Chelsea. It feels like four wins there and it might be quite interesting. For Liverpool they also have some tricky games and if they drop points and we have a perfect momentum, then maybe I will revisit my thinking come mid-March. But it feels a lot of “stars must align” thinking right now. This season for us has been the one in which injuries, ridiculous refereeing decisions and a bit of luck has gone against us. But we still need to give the lads credit for hanging in there.

Let’s hope they keep on doing that for the next month or so at least.

Back tomorrow.