The atmosphere at the Emirates had completely changed its character.
That easy majestic confidence of an hour ago, the confidence of a side two goals up against opponents who seemed to be running out of ideas and legs simultaneously had drained out of the stands the way heat leaves a room when a window opens.
Arsenal's full-backs had pulled back noticeably; Gibbs and Sagna both holding deeper lines than Wenger would have chosen in the first half. Koscielny and Mertesacker sat tighter across the back.
And in midfield, whenever Julien received the ball or even shifted his weight as though he might receive it, an Arsenal player was on him immediately, not closing him down in the normal sense, but inhabiting the same square meter, making the space around him feel smaller than it was.
Wenger's adjustments were working on paper. Several Liverpool attempts to sent the ball through to Julien were read early and cut off; his runs into the channel were consistently met by a second body arriving just as the first committed.
His touches were fewer. The openings that had materialized in the fifty-third minute, apparently created from nothing by a single incisive pass, were no longer appearing in the same way.
And then Arsenal broke.
Cazorla played it into Ozil's feet in midfield and rather than circulating as he had been doing for the last several minutes, Ozil lifted his head and read what was behind him. Sagna had stepped forward fractionally on the right side of Liverpool's defensive line. The gap was small, and it existed for perhaps two seconds.
He chipped it through.
The ball left his foot on a thread, rising just enough to clear the midfield press, dropping with precision aimed at Giroud's run off Sakho's shoulder, targeting the corridor between Liverpool's center-back and his covering defender.
Giroud and Sakho arrived at the same space simultaneously, two large men were fighting a private war at full speed.
Sakho got his body across and made it physical, and Giroud had to earn every centimeter. The Arsenal supporters were already on their feet.
Giroud got into position for a good chance, but the physical battle had taken something from him, the timing of his jump was fractionally off. He got under it. The ball flew up over the crossbar and out over the roof netting, and the space where the net should have been shaking was empty sky.
The collective gasp came first, then the groan of fifty thousand people releasing a held breath in the worst possible way. The celebrations that had been forming in throats turned to sighs before they could find their shape.
Giroud stood with his hands pressed to the top of his head, eyes fixed on the spot above the crossbar where the ball had gone. His whole body was a single expression of disbelief at what the moment had refused to give him.
It was Arsenal's best chance of the second half.
Wenger had been half-crouching in the instinctive lean of anticipation, his body was already inclining toward a celebration.
He straightened up slowly, rubbed his temple, let out a breath through his nose. Then he reorganized his face into something functional and made a hand signal toward the pitch: stay organised, maintain the intensity, don't let the near-miss take anything from the shape.
After Giroud's chance, the match opened into a sustained period of exchange that had the quality of two sides who have stopped conserving and started gambling.
The sixty-fourth minute: Gerrard broke up another Cazorla pass in the center of the pitch and played Henderson immediately. Henderson received it moving, took one touch to shape, and crossed from the right.
Koscielny got up first again and met it with his forehead, the clearance was solid. But it dropped short, falling to Sturridge outside the box with the defender already having committed his momentum to the wrong direction.
Sturridge hit it on the full volley without letting it bounce; the ball was rising hard and low. Ramsey threw himself across the shot's path, horizontal, and it cannoned off his back and flew out for a corner. Liverpool took it, and it came to nothing, and they settled for having asked the question.
The sixty-eighth minute carried more incident than it had any right to contain.
Ozil in midfield was collecting, rolling one touch around Kanté's outstretched leg with ease, and slipping the ball down the line to Ramsey.
Ramsey drove forward and cut his pass diagonally inside to Giroud, who tried to spin Sakho with a sharp half-turn; Sakho got a toe to the ball and deflected the finish away from goal.
The ball rolled to Szczesny, who gathered it without drama.
But Liverpool's counter off the keeper's distribution broke down in midfield when Ozil read the outlet pass and stepped across it, and Cazorla arriving onto the second ball with his body already set shaped and hit a shot from twenty-five yards that left his foot clean and climbed toward the top-right corner.
Mignolet was already moving, launched himself full-length, and pushed it over the bar with the heel of his hand.
"What a save, that was absolutely vital!" Parry's voice climbed sharply.
Arsenal had come within the width of a goalkeeper's hand of a third. The match had opened completely, and both sides were creating, and the scoreboard still read 1–2.
On Liverpool's side, Julien was working with fewer touches now under the doubled attention but the attention itself was evidence of something. You don't shadow a player who isn't dangerous.
He was still probing, still arriving at the ball in half-spaces and attempting to manufacture something from compressed situations: a back-to-goal reception at the edge of the box where he tried to spin Koscielny, the defender was reading it and staying glued, denying the shot.
On Arsenal's side, the through-ball into the channel was cut out by Gerrard, who had tracked the run before it started.
Close calls everywhere, and the clock was still moving.
At seventy minutes, Klopp made a double substitution, and the changes told a story about what had been spent.
Kanté came off, he'd been on a yellow card since before the goal, unable to go fully into challenges, which for a player whose entire game is built on the ability to commit completely to tackles is like asking a painter to work with one hand tied.
Beside him, Henderson came off too, the legs that had been going for some time now finally given permission to stop. Both of them had given the match everything they had and were running on credit that had run out.
On came Lucas, more defensively secure, a player whose value was entirely in what he prevented rather than what he created. And Sterling, young and quick and carrying none of the fatigue that had accumulated in every other Liverpool body on the pitch.
Klopp caught Sterling at the edge of the technical area as he came on, one hand on his shoulder: "Raheem. Use your pace. Every time you get it on that right flank, go at their full-back. Don't look for the safe option. Go."
Sterling didn't need long to prove the instruction had been received.
Right flank, first touch, Gibbs closing with the compact, disciplined shape.
Sterling dropped his shoulder, dragged the ball back with his left foot, cut his body right and Gibbs, who had committed to the direction that Sterling's shoulder had advertised, was left standing on the wrong piece of grass. Sterling drove inside into the box with his head up.
Several people in the press box straightened up at the same moment.
The resemblance, once you'd seen it, was difficult to unsee a darker, younger version of the same movement pattern that had been causing Arsenal problems all evening.
Sterling found Julien moving to receive him inside the box. One-two, quick and clean, Sterling releasing off the return pass at full stride. His shot was hit with conviction, the thud of boot on ball was carrying even into the stands and the ball struck the outside of the right post and flew away into the crowd.
Sterling looked at the sky for a single second. Then he turned and found Julien and gave him a thumbs up.
The chance had frightened Wenger.
He was on his feet, turning to his bench, his voice urgent in a way it hadn't been for most of the match.
At the next stoppage, two changes came in quick succession.
Gibbs, the man Sterling had just turned inside out, came off for Vermaelen who was more physical, more experienced. Rosický, whose legs had been fading for the last quarter of an hour, came off for Monreal, a specialist in defensive wide duties.
The message was clear, and nobody in the Emirates needed it translated. Two defenders replacing two attackers, protect what we have. Don't let football's momentum do what football's momentum does.
Vermaelen jogged immediately to Koscielny and they ran through the adjustments on the move, Vermaelen was pointing toward Sterling before he'd even found his position.
Monreal went wide left and began waving the defensive line narrower, physically shepherding his teammates into the compressed shape Wenger had asked for, cutting off the channels that Sterling and Julien had been finding.
Klopp stood watching from the touchline, hands in pockets, his face was giving nothing away. Wenger stood opposite him with his arms folded and his brow drawn watching the same pitch from the other direction.
What had been, an hour ago, a comfortable lead had become a tightrope. The score had not changed, but the feeling inside the stadium had changed.
The seventy-fourth minute.
Liverpool found the seam in the join between Arsenal's recovering shape and its new defensive solidity, the place where the old positioning and the new instructions hadn't quite reconciled yet.
Lucas played it to Julien centrally, twelve meters outside the box, the ball arriving with pace on the ground. Ramsey came to close quickly, decisively, his whole body was committed to getting there before Julien could turn and face goal.
Julien received it with his back to Ramsey and his weight fractionally on his right side. It was the lean of a man about to go right. Ramsey read it and shifted his own weight to cover that side, the adjustment was instinctive.
At the precise instant Ramsey's weight committed, Julien pushed the ball right and then stepped left. Clean. Through the gap that Ramsey's weight-shift had opened by closing.
Ramsey, caught between two instantaneous truths about where the ball had been and where it now was, reached out and grabbed the jersey. His other foot went for the ball in the same desperate movement.
Julien went to ground.
Tweet.
Webb's whistle was instant, the sound was cutting through the noise before the play had even settled. He pointed to the spot. No card this time but a warning look at Ramsey.
Free kick for Liverpool.
Everyone in the stadium understood what it meant.
The position was close to ideal: just right of the penalty arc, the kind of location that splits a goalkeeper's preparation in two because it can go anywhere. Direct over the wall, curled around it, passed short for a run, the situation offered every option.
Julien, Gerrard, and Sturridge gathered around the ball in a tight huddle, their heads were bent close. From the stands, from the television cameras, from Wenger standing forty meters away, nothing of what they said was visible.
Only the discussion, and the seriousness with which it was being conducted.
In the Arsenal wall, Szczęsny was already organizing. He called Koscielny and Mertesacker into position to seal the near-post route, spacing his other defenders with quick, precise gestures: "Watch for the variation, don't move until the ball moves. If they dummy it, hold your line."
The home end sent up a wall of jeering to break concentration, to introduce noise into the space where focus lives. The Liverpool away supporters answered it immediately, standing, scarves raised, holding their breath.
Webb raised his hand, swept it, and blew.
Gerrard and Julien moved at precisely the same moment.
Gerrard took two strides toward the ball in full-bodied, committed strides, the strides of a man about to hit something very hard.
The Arsenal wall shifted its weight toward the near post against a shot that seemed certain. Gerrard walked past the ball, his stride was carrying him over it without touching it, his momentum was continuing as though the ball had been struck and he was following through.
The wall held for one beat too long in the wrong position.
Julien was already accelerating through, his left foot finding the ball, his body over it, the contact made on the lower half where the spin begins.
The ball left the turf in a tight, climbing spiral and bent out from the wall, arcing away from it, curling toward the upper right corner of the goal hit.
Szczęsny threw himself full length to his right.
He was nowhere close.
The ball kissed the inside of the post and dropped across the line.
2–2.
Liverpool, from 0–2 down, were level.
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