Former Arsenal man Lee Dixon has lashed out at Unai Emery and his backroom staff for their behaviour at Anfield last weekend.
The Gunners lost the game 3-1 to the relentless Reds, and the Arsenal boss barked orders at his players from the touch-line.
This is to be expected, mind, but maybe not another couple of the club coaches doing the same thing – it can confuse a player, if there are too many voices.
“We’ve just seen [Pierre-Emerick] Aubameyang who’s just gone off the pitch, he’s just come back on the pitch,” Dixon is quoted as saying by the Express.
“Unai Emery is a very demonstrative and animated coach and then once he starts and his staff are the pointing fingers and trying to direct traffic, I think sometimes as a player you can get dragged into that.
“There’s three people up there shouting things. There needs to be a calmness. It’s a throw in, they’ve lost the ball. Coaches give information and [speaking to Andy Townsend] you know, you’ve played at the highest level.
“You’ve got so many things going on, the last thing you need is a coach to be going ‘yeah but you should be doing that, should be doing that’.
“He can’t coach everybody so he’s coaching the nearest and if the nearest one makes a bad decision, everybody else follows.”
The Gunners really didn’t make a good account of themselves at Anfield, with the majority of their tactics devolving into simply hoofing the ball up to one of the pacy forwards.
To be fair, it almost worked on several occasions as new boy Nicolas Pepe did look lively on the right flank, and he got the better of Andy Robertson a few times – something which shouldn’t be taken lightly.
But, whether it was what Dixon has mentioned or something else, there’s no denying that Arsenal didn’t look like a team that was going to take any points away from Merseyside last weekend.