Arsenal fans are crawling back out of the woodwork after Liverpool’s exit from the Champions League — and Jamie Carragher has not been spared the ridicule of these rival supporters.
It shouldn’t really be a surprise that Arsenal fans are celebrating this PSG win as a personal victory, with their own season rapidly disintegrating. Now 15 points behind in the Premier League with a solitary game in hand, Mikel Arteta will soon need to be more concerned with looking over his shoulder at the race for Champions League places.
Meanwhile, Slot has the chance this weekend to claim his maiden trophy in his first season at Anfield. And even if he ended up with “just” the league title, that would still be fulfilling a dream Arsenal has had for over two decades.
So after the disappointment of Tuesday, Liverpool has more or less been able to dust itself down now, ahead of a massively consequential end to the campaign. That has been the message from the players, including Virgil van Dijk and Curtis Jones.
Even so, the nature of modern football means that Liverpool players and fans have had to take their medicine, so to speak. Every defeat is a meme-able moment, a potential comedic goldmine.
And Carragher has revealed that he was on the end of some such sharp wit from an Arsenal fan. And he faced the indignity of receiving the “banter” through a train tannoy system.
“I was on the train this morning, obviously a bit disappointed with last night,” Carragher recounted to CBS Sports. (He later withdrew from the show through illness, although he has revealed that he is feeling better now.) “The Champions League music comes on the train, why? Never heard that before.
“And then the guy starts saying “When you get to Euston, if you want directions to Paris…” so I’m thinking what’s he on about here? And then he did the same when we got there.
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“So I said to the lad who was the attendant, I said “where’s the train driver?” I thought he’d just be there, because I was in the last carriage.
“He went “oh, he’s three down, four down”, it was too far to go, we’d just got into Euston. He was an Arsenal fan, I found out, and he was putting all that on.
“So I said to the attendant, “do us a favor, make sure you tell him that Arsenal haven’t won anything for 20 years. And just make sure you tell him I told you.””
That’s not strictly true, with Arsenal collecting a handful of FA Cups over the past two decades. Yet Carragher is right that fans are surely in no position to mock Liverpool, which has claimed a Premier League and two Champions Leagues in the same period, not to mention a similarly impressive array of domestic cups.
We’ll have to see how long Arsenal’s smugness in the Champions League lasts, with Real Madrid up next. A fifth consecutive trophyless season under Arteta would surely silence even the most shameless Gunners.
