The night passed without incident.
The following day, Liverpool's squad trained as usual. Klopp had spent the hours after the match turning ideas over in his mind, barely sleeping—replaying passages of play on the backs of his eyelids, searching for ways to sharpen what had already been sharp, to tighten what had already been tight.
His thoughts churned through the small hours with the relentless, slightly compulsive obsessive way.
He wasn't dissatisfied, exactly. Victory had a particular feeling and he knew it. But satisfaction, in his experience, was the first step toward complacency, and complacency was a luxury no title contender could afford in February.
Yet despite the restless night, Klopp arrived at the training ground electric with energy.
That was the strange transformation of the man. He coached movement and tactics gesturing, shouting across the pitch, occasionally dropping into demonstrations that his players watched with amusement as they respected him too much to laugh outright.
His instructions were precise and demanding. He paced the lines with restlessness as he had spent the night identifying problems and had arrived here determined to solve them before the week was out.
The Liverpool players had, by now, grown used to their manager's passionate style. More than that—they had come to need it.
Football was meant to be visceral. That was the whole point.
During a break in training, the players fell naturally to chatting about Arsenal's match that evening.
The current standings told a clean story.
Liverpool sat in first with 52 points, having played a game more. Arsenal occupied second with 51, carrying a match in hand—a fact the media had been picking at all week like a scab, as though a game in hand were the same thing as points on the board.
Julien had heard that argument enough times to find it faintly tedious.
He reckoned the situation would weigh heavily on Arsenal all the same, especially with their fixture list growing more brutal by the week. But he wouldn't be watching the game—not even a stream.
The reason was simple. Pauline had come to Liverpool for yesterday's match, and they'd made plans: a proper afternoon date together once training was done.
So, Julien had other priorities.
Time slipped by.
When he woke the next morning and reached for his phone, still half-submerged in sleep, the news alerts had already gathered themselves into a verdict. He read the headline once, then again, and felt a slow smile spread across his face.
Arsenal had drawn 2–2 away at Southampton.
The result landed in the Premier League table like a stone dropped into still water. It reshuffled things intensely, or rather plunged the table into fresh chaos of exactly the kind that made Media riot.
Liverpool and Arsenal were now level on 52 points, with the Reds claiming top spot on goal difference. Arsenal dropped to second. Manchester City and Chelsea sat joint third and fourth on 50—close enough that any slip from either of the top two would invite them straight back into the conversation.
The title race had entered a hot phase.
After saying goodbye to Pauline—Julien rode to Melwood and skimmed the match report on the way.
Arsenal versus Southampton had been a rollercoaster of the most gruelling kind.
The Gunners had fallen behind at St. Mary's in the first half. They'd fought their way back to level, then pushed ahead a lead and for a period, it had looked as though it might be enough to see them through. Then the closing stages had unravelled it. A lapse, a set piece allowed too much space, and Southampton had levelled.
Arsenal earned a point they could hardly savour.
Worse still, midfielder Flamini received a red card for a flying tackle on Schneiderlin. He would face a suspension now, adding to the squad's growing personnel problems.
The press had also noted that the draw seemed to vindicate a prediction Rooney had made the previous November.
After Manchester United beat league-leaders Arsenal 1–0 at Old Trafford, Rooney had been asked about the title race in the post-match corridor. He'd said: "We've seen Arsenal up near the top before, and then come March they tend to fall away. We'll see where they are in March next year."
Nobody had paid it much attention at the time. Now, with February barely a day away, that line had acquired a different texture.
Now, with February approaching, the Gunners were showing precisely those signs of fatigue.
The dropped points had cost them first place.
Liverpool, meanwhile, had ridden the momentum of their derby victory, three crucial points that sent them back to the summit, with goal difference as the decisive margin.
It was the club's latest stint at the top of the English Premier League this season.
Julien reflected on something that had long struck him as true: Arsenal's difficulties weren't only about the table. The real problem lay ahead of them.
The schedule was, in a word, hellish.
Over the next sixty days, the Gunners faced thirteen fixtures: nine in the Premier League, two in the FA Cup, two in the Champions League.
The opposition read like a curated list of the competition's most demanding opponents—Liverpool, Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea, and Tottenham in domestic football; Bayern Munich in Europe, a side many considered among the two or three most likely to lift the Champions League that season.
Even the fixtures that looked manageable on paper—Crystal Palace, Stoke City carried their own hazards. There was no harbour in that run. Nowhere to catch breath.
The statistics on Arsenal and February, which Julien had absorbed over years of following the league were brutal.
Over the previous eight seasons, the pattern had repeated itself with regularity that stopped feeling like coincidence and started feeling like character.
In 2005/06, one win from five February league games had tumbled them out of contention.
In 2007/08, the 4–0 humiliation at Old Trafford arrived with Eduardo's horrific leg break, that knocked the breath from the squad.
In 2010/11, the 4–4 draw against Newcastle—a match Arsenal had been leading comfortably before an inexplicable second-half collapse surrendered four goals had announced something about their psychological fragility to a wider world that had been quietly wondering.
And last season, a steady enough league campaign had fractured at precisely the moment Bayern arrived in the Champions League knockout rounds, the European elimination punctured their confidence in domestic performances at the worst possible time.
The pattern showed more than bad luck or difficult draws. It revealed a collective difficulty: maintaining intensity and conviction under continuous pressure, grinding results when the football wouldn't flow, finding winning ugly when winning beautifully wasn't available.
Those were the things that separated title contenders from title winners.
This current season had offered Arsenal further evidence to worry about. Defeats to both Manchester clubs. Elimination from the League Cup at Chelsea's hands. A draw at home to Liverpool that had felt more like a point surrendered than one earned.
Even the win over Tottenham had required the security of the Emirates to produce, and the margin had been closer than comfortable. Their record away from home against the division's upper tier remained a question nobody had answered satisfactorily.
The one genuine silver lining, at least, was fitness. Only Walcott remained sidelined and Walcott's pace was a weapon, certainly, but the squad's more essential pieces were intact and in form.
Off the pitch, two significant pieces of news had also landed in the same week.
First: Arsenal had signed a five-year kit deal with Puma worth a reported £170 million showing a substantial boost to the club's finances.
Second: CEO Gazidis had confirmed a new three-year contract for Wenger, at €8 million per season, totalling £24 million over the term. Should Wenger see it through, he would have managed Arsenal for twenty years showing a guarantee of stability that few could match.
Reading the figures, Julien shook his head with admiration.
This was one of London's great clubs, after all.
Eight years without a trophy, and yet the commercial environment continued to produce numbers like these. The brand was maintained by history and identity and global reach while being sustained by Wenger's reputation alone even through the lean years.
In that respect, Liverpool simply couldn't compare.
The media had also picked apart Arsenal's transfer intentions in the final days of the window.
The pursuit of Schalke midfielder Draxler had reportedly been rebuffed as Schalke remain unmoved so the deal was dead.
Attention had since shifted toward two French targets: Lyon midfielder Gourcuff and PSG winger Mené.
Gourcuff was twenty-seven, technically refined, with three goals and five assists in thirteen Ligue 1 appearances this season. His contract was expired in the summer and his value had declined to around €6 million, and Lyon's financial position made the negotiation more straightforward than it might otherwise have been.
Mené had fallen to the fringes at PSG and was seeking regular football. Arsenal held an edge over Juventus and Inter in that race, thanks to Wenger's personal prestige—and the fact that Mené's contract also expired in the summer kept the fee minimal.
At the post-match press conference following the Southampton draw, Wenger addressed the result with distinctive candour.
"I think Southampton were the better side in the first half—they deserved to be ahead. But in the second half, we were more like ourselves. It was a good game. We showed character, we responded to a difficult situation, and on balance I don't think the result is too bad. It's a fair point, and Southampton deserved credit for their performance. Though I do feel we were a little unlucky with the first goal—I think Monreal was clearly fouled."
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