Ten years ago this month, Arsenal and Liverpool opened the Premier League season with seven goals at the Emirates. It finished Arsenal 3-4 Liverpool, and it is remembered as one of the great opening-day matches.
Anyone in Malawi looking through the opening fixtures on the Premier Bet football betting pages stands where those supporters stood: at the start of a season nobody can predict yet.
The afternoon nobody could keep up with
Arsenal began well and led through Theo Walcott after 31 minutes, moments after Liverpool goalkeeper Simon Mignolet had saved a Walcott penalty, the first the forward had taken in more than 10 years at the club. Philippe Coutinho levelled in first-half stoppage time with a free-kick from 30 yards, and then Arsenal lost control of the afternoon. Adam Lallana scored four minutes into the second half, Coutinho added his second on 56 minutes, and Sadio Mane, a £30million signing from Southampton making his debut, cut inside and drove in a fourth on 63.
Liverpool’s manager, Jurgen Klopp, celebrated Lallana’s goal so hard he knocked his own glasses off his face, and had to fish around on the ground to find them while the Emirates took in what was happening.
Arsenal, missing seven players and fielding 20-year-old Rob Holding, a £2million signing from Bolton, alongside Calum Chambers in central defence, did not give up. Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain beat three men for the sixth goal of the afternoon, and Chambers headed in from Santi Cazorla’s free-kick with 15 minutes left. The equaliser never came, and at full time the home crowd booed.
What nobody knew yet
Most opening-day matches, even the great ones, end up meaning no more than any other match. This one ended up meaning more. The season before, Arsenal had finished second and Liverpool eighth. By the following May, Liverpool had climbed into the top four and Arsenal had dropped out of it.
| Club | 2015-16 finish | 2016-17 finish | 2016-17 points |
| Arsenal | 2nd | 5th | 75 |
| Liverpool | 8th | 4th | 76 |
Arsenal’s fifth place ended a run of 20 straight top-four finishes, stretching back to 1996-97. Liverpool’s fourth was their first since 2013-14.
To be clear about what that one-point margin means: a single point over 38 games could have fallen either way, and the match in August decided none of it directly. That is the honest reading of the table, and it is also what makes the afternoon worth looking back on. Nobody watching that day could tell that one club’s long era was ending and another’s was beginning.
The managers, on the day
Neither manager talked like a man at a turning point. Arsenal’s manager, Arsene Wenger, told BBC Sport: “We lacked experience at the back and we were physically short. Liverpool did well and we were for 15 minutes completely shocked.”
Klopp, typically, blamed himself for the nerves of the closing stages. “I played a big part in the excitement of the last half-hour, because it’s not allowed to celebrate the fourth goal like this with 35 minutes to go,” he told BBC Sport.
Within two years, Wenger had announced he was leaving Arsenal after almost 22 seasons in charge. Klopp stayed at Liverpool until 2024 and left with the club transformed.
Ten years on, the places have swapped again
The reason the anniversary feels so different now is that the swapping never stopped. Arsenal start the new season as reigning champions, and Mikel Arteta has just paid Newcastle £75m for Bruno Guimaraes to defend the title. Liverpool begin again under Andoni Iraola, appointed head coach in July.
A decade ago it was Arsenal who looked permanent and Liverpool who were starting over. Nobody watching in 2016 predicted what came next, which is a useful thing to remember about opening weekends.
The two clubs will meet twice more in the season that is about to start. The last time they shared an opening day, it produced seven goals, and the season it opened rearranged the top of English football. Whatever this season’s meetings bring, the lesson of 2016 stands: on opening day, nobody can yet tell which era is ending.
