It’s December, and struggling Liverpool finally have their Swedish centre-forward summer signing firing. Alert, slick, clinical, having netted seven of the last eight Liverpool goals. The first player in the league’s history to net in four of their first five starts, her equaliser silenced the Emirates.
If Beata Olsson had not walked in on an Arsenal team being examined for a disappointing season, if she had not latched on to some loose ends and left the scene messier than it started, she might have stolen the limelight.
Instead, it was another Swede who won the day. Stina Blackstenius’s late goal to secure a crucial 2-1 win showed signs of life in the Gunners, even if it will do little to stop the inquest.
How much closer Arsenal are to winning the league than they were 12 months ago will not be answered on a day like this but they seem intent on throwing up more questions. The main one here – as Chelsea discovered before the international break – being: how does one break down a stubborn Liverpool side, demonstrating evidence of progress under Gareth Taylor? Still no win, but four unbeaten. They may be bottom but they could stay there and still line up as a Women’s Super League side next year, given the absence of automatic relegation.
The first half hour was in tune with the start of Arsenal’s season. They haven’t beaten the elite teams in either the WSL or Europe and they have even stumbled against the league’s middle class.
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Olivia Smith scored against her former club, as scripted, ambling around her old team-mates and neatly driving the ball into the net at the Clock End. Leah Williamson, meanwhile, was back in the squad for the first time since she lifted the Champions League trophy back in May.
Liverpool played a brave high line that allowed Arsenal’s front four the run of the pitch in behind, often saved only by the length of a Gemma Evans limb flung from a seemingly unattached space of Emirates air. It was set to be a relatively easy, low-stakes study on how to make a statement.
And yet everything that came after had the symptoms of the story of their season, too. Mid-table in the Champions League, their worst start to a league campaign since 2014; now five points off the top with leaders Manchester City playing on Sunday.
Arsenal are the champions of Europe, huffing and puffing against the bottom team in the league
Here are the only WSL club who can consistently pull in crowds of more than 34,000 even with the club’s men playing at the same time. Here are the club with both the marketing budget and centralised “intelligence” departments that commit more than most in the world to expertise, the club synonymous with ambition in the women’s game.
Here are the champions of Europe. And here they are huffing and puffing against the bottom team in the league, who were able to name only five substitutes on the bench instead of nine.
It is often noted that Arsenal have picked the oldest starting line-up in the league this season, almost two years above the average of everyone else in the WSL. Eight players have been there since 2021, and Arsenal are as reliant on most of them now as they were then.
This was demonstrated by Arsenal’s warm, slightly desperate, welcome to the returning Williamson and 35-year-old Kim Little. Beth Mead and Katie McCabe are among the other cult heroes of this Arsenal side, but it is no secret that they have been overburdened, too.
Over the next two weeks, Arsenal compete on three fronts. They must improve to progress to the next stage of the Champions League, advance amid a strong last eight in the League Cup, and prove something more in the WSL. Put simply, this has to be the beginning of a season-shaping streak.
Last summer was the moment that everything changed, but come winter, we are none the wiser as to whether Arsenal are in reach of their domestic dreams.
Photograph by Alex Burstow/Arsenal FC via Getty Images