One club emerged real winner from Premier League title race epic - but it wasn't Liverpool or Man City

Not every football match stands up to deep analysis. Liverpool and Manchester City’s pulsating Premier League draw at Anfield on Sunday was a perfect example. You can go over as many heat maps or passing charts as you like, but it won’t really help you to appreciate what happened. This was a game of two brilliant teams going at each other hammer and tongs which boiled down to a handful of individual moments which could have swung either way, and which ultimately produced no winner – except, of course, for Arsenal.

It’s not that there wasn’t anything to say tactically. There was plenty to say about the way Jürgen Klopp’s high press broke City down – a team once so assured with the ball in defence and midfield suddenly proved vulnerable and uncertain. There was plenty to say about City’s dicey but ultimately effective offside trap, or about the brilliantly crafty corner routine which allowed John Stones to open the scoring, or the way Liverpool's unusual defensive selection served to keep Phil Foden quiet and isolated.

But in truth, the story of the 1-1 draw didn’t involve anything that you could mark on a chalkboard or boil down to raw numbers – it was all about the different ways that the players involved reacted to the big moments, the way pressure and opportunity were dealt with, and about the deep sense of tension that permeated the Merseyside air throughout the afternoon.

There was Luis Díaz, put clean through on goal but ultimately blowing the best chance either side produced from open play. There was Jérémy Doku’s late shot which clattered back off the inside of the post and back into the grateful arms of Caoimhín Kelleher. And, of course, the other clattering the young Belgian was responsible for, into the chest of Alexis Mac Allister with studs high in the penalty area.

Perhaps it should have been a penalty, although it’s strange to see so many pundits – of both the professional and unpaid social media-based variety – discussing it in terms of such certainty. Did Doku get the ball? Yes, a bit, but not necessarily enough of it. Was his boot dangerously high? Borderline, surely, and nobody could seriously suggest that he didn’t have a right to go for it. It would, perhaps, have been a strangely unsatisfying way to decide the game, even if it was the right one. Maybe.

One could certainly argue that Liverpool would have deserved to win based on their second-half performance. They were superb for those 45 minutes, making City look brittle and bullying them off a succession of second balls, but clear-cut chances were few and far between save for Mac Allister’s penalty and Díaz’s poorly-executed one-on-one.

City struggled as a unit, but on an individual basis their players were still excellent, making key challenges at the last moment or coming up with one or two brilliant saves, as replacement goalkeeper Stefan Ortega did. Not that there weren’t plenty of foul-ups in there, too, Ederson’s calamitous challenge of Darwin Núñez being the obvious one.

It was odd to hear Peter Drury claim on Sky Sports’ commentary that Ederson was normally such a good judge of those one-on-one situations – has he really? That, surely, has always been Ederson’s greatest weakness, a willingness and even determination to rush out to claim the ball and play it out which sometimes exceeds his capacity to do so. It is only a few weeks since his howler gifted FC København an unexpected and ultimately fruitless equaliser in the Champions League, for starters. This was far from his first offence.

There was the time he wiped out Diogo Jota, back when he was playing for Wolverhampton Wanderers, after haring outside of his box to make an interception that was never on. And the time he did the same thing at Old Trafford in 2020, the game in which he made two further howlers to gift United a 2-0 derby day win. He has form, including in big matches.

But even analysing Ederson’s strengths and weaknesses doesn’t really do much in this case, despite the fact that they were pivotal to the outcome. Sometimes, the best course is not to worry about the tactical framework behind the match but to simply enjoy the drama of the spectacle in front of you – and Liverpool v Manchester City served that up in spades, an almost ceaseless stream of moments and near-misses upon which the fate of the title race might have hinged. And in the end, Arsenal won.

Because while the story of the game was about fine margins, the ending was a stalemate, a failure by both sides to land the killer blow. For all the melodrama of the game, a Hollywood scriptwriter would have his work rejected if he turned in a piece which failed to wrap up everything up with a suitably emotional winning moment. Instead, we just get a continuation of the tension until the next chapter, with the team who gained most off-screen the entire time.

But here’s the best thing – we get to do it all again, just as soon as domestic football returns after the March international break. Mikel Arteta’s team have to go to the Etihad and get a result, a feat which eluded them last season when the title was on the line. But the Gunners are looking more assured by the match, while City look more fragile than they have done since Guardiola’s early days at the club. It would be a fool who placed money on the identity of the league leader come the beginning of April.

But it’s also a fool who doesn’t just sit back and enjoy this title race for what it is. Genuine two-horse races don’t come round every year, especially during the era of City’s almost unceasing dominance, but a three-way battle with just a point between the sides with ten games to go is a treat to savour. There has been too little tension in the final ten games of too many Premier League seasons in recent years – that looks unlikely to be the case this time around. Nails will be bitten and games will turn on the tiniest of errors and on moments of transcendent brilliance. And that’s what sport is all about. Arsenal were one winner of Sunday's game - we, the viewers, were the other.