Back to the Arsenal Newsfeed

KEOWN TALKS TACTICS: Liverpool are the kings of catching teams offside this season and their immense pressure is down to a team effort... opponents will look to hurt them with a long ball over the top, but Virgil van Dijk and Co are waiting

At Arsenal the shout would be ‘squeeze’. That’s the word which would be yelled when Thierry Henry and Dennis Bergkamp were engaging in a high press. The midfield line would squeeze up with them, and so would the back line.

We knew that if our forwards pressured their opponents enough, then with no options in midfield, the opposition would be panicked into playing the ball forward in a hurry — and we’d be waiting for that moment.

Once the long ball inevitably arrived, so did the assistant’s flag, because we would have held our line and made sure the striker was behind our back line.