If last season's visit to Anfield taught Arsenal anything, it was the need for a killer in the final third to break the game open. Fail to do so and they are vulnerable to the sort of magic that bamboozled them in August of last year, even if the man who scored that brilliant free-kick winner, Dominik Szoboszlai, is a doubt for Liverpool on Sunday.

And if this game is indeed one that will be decided by what Mikel Arteta terms the "moments players," then it could scarcely have come at a worse time for the Arsenal manager. Bukayo Saka -- the Gunners' top shot taker, goal scorer and expected goals compiler -- has more than a month left on the sidelines with the thigh injury he suffered in Munich. Noni Madueke could miss the trip with an ankle injury. Christos Tzolis has returned to training but has not played for his new club in more than a month. Max Dowman, the precocious youngster whom Arteta has already entrusted with turning the tide on Merseyside, will serve the first of a three-game ban for his controversial red card.

It speaks to the depth at Arteta's disposal that, even if none of the aforementioned quartet play, there will still be game changers in the side. Even so, this does feel like an occasion where a first-choice center forward in top form would be handy. Kai Havertz is not that. Twelve games in and this has been perhaps the weirdest season of all since this esoteric forward landed on English soil in 2020. At his best, he has blown his former club Chelsea away. His worst, meanwhile, includes a wasteful performance in the EFL Cup defeat at Fleetwood and a baffling new tendency to slip offside. 

The obvious answer when a player slides from peak to trough in a matter of weeks is to consult his injury record. Havertz did return from the last international break early after straining a muscle and went straight back into the side, playing an hour against Leeds and featuring in every other game since. In those six games he has no goals and one assist. In most of the minutes he has played, he has struggled to link the Arsenal attack together the way he usually does, let alone to threaten the opposition goal. That is not, however, a hangover from his injury travails.

"There's nothing to do with that," said Arteta. "It's true that in terms of the numbers, we have dropped those numbers but he certainly had the chances as well to play."

That was the case against Fleetwood, seven shots for the German adding up to 0.72 expected goals. That sounds perfectly adequate on first pass, and there are certainly others in the Arsenal side who ought to have asked more of a League Two defense. And yet when chasing a game for 70 minutes, is it fair to ask for more than three-quarters of an xG from the senior attacker of the English champions, a man who has scored in two Champions League finals?

Wanting a bit more has been a familiar experience for both Chelsea and Arsenal during his time with them. For the Gunners, it has been over two and a half years since they discovered just how good Havertz could be for them. The shift to center forward in a 3-1 win over Sunday's opponents, Liverpool, was the start of a brilliant year leading the line. Across 37 Premier League games, the Germany international delivered 18 goals and nine assists, not Erling Haaland numbers but exceptional output for the center forward in Arteta's everyone-eats offense.

Even since that brilliant run, there have been flashes. For an hour in May's Champions League final, Havertz was as threatening an attacker as anyone in PSG colors. A few weeks earlier he had been excellent in defeat to Manchester City, not the first time he had bossed Arsenal's title rival. If Chelsea have the misfortune of running into their former star, they're probably going to get him in the mood to do some damage. Of all the attackers available to Arteta this week, Havertz is the nearest he has to a big-game hunter.

Indeed, if you want to make the case against Arsenal "just signing a striker" in January (you shouldn't), a key component of your argument ought to be how few players suit this manager as well as a fully fit Havertz. It is just that, well, a fully fit Havertz has been an elusive creature.

And yet if Arteta will not use injuries as justification for the current wobble, perhaps we shouldn't. And wobble this is. Through eight league games, Havertz is averaging fewer shots, goals and non-penalty xG than in any other season in his Arsenal career on a per-90 basis. The same is true when you adjust for the fact that the 27-year-old is touching the ball a bit less on average this season than last.

There is one notable stat where Havertz's numbers have skyrocketed, though, and that is in offsides. In every Premier League season before this one, he was caught out behind the opposition defense on less than one occasion per 90 minutes. In most of them, he averaged around one offside per two full games played. This year, however, no one in the league matches Havertz's 10 offsides already, and the gap is not particularly close. Joint-second on seven are his teammate Bukayo Saka and Dominic Calvert-Lewin of Leeds. 

Now, the sample size of minutes is still small and open to distortion. It might be that one explanation for Havertz's skyrocketing offsides is that he has played Aston Villa and their occasionally effective, invariably cavalier high line. Equally, not all of those 10 offsides are about what the defense did well or about a run that came at just the wrong moment from the center forward. Watch Havertz move a good moment too soon to collect a pass off his friend and captain Martin Odegaard before bending well wide from a promising shooting position against Villa, and you see what looks like a forward who is simply off color, nothing more and nothing less, really. Sometimes the easiest explanation is the correct one. Havertz is just a bit out of sync with both his game and that of his teammates, as his manager acknowledged on Friday.

"That kind of form and that kind of efficiency with the front players, it's very common," said Arteta. "Full trust on him and what he's doing."

The natural response, then, for Arteta would be to pick the next cab off the rank, as he did in the win over Everton where Viktor Gyokeres started. That was the Swede's best game of the season, but he still did not register a shot. Gyokeres scored against Fleetwood but took only two other shots. Per 90, he averages 0.92 shots, 16th on Arsenal, with both left backs ahead of him. The evidence of his past entanglements with elite opposition suggests that Gyokeres is not the player to turn to at Anfield.

Instead, it will be Havertz, in need of something of a jump-start to his season. While he retains the "full trust" of a manager who has never faltered in his support, there might be time enough to sniff out his best form. 

Viewing information -- Liverpool vs. Arsenal

Date: Sunday, Nov. 1 | Time: 11:30 a.m. ET
Location: Anfield, Liverpool, United Kingdom
TV: USA | Live stream: fuboTV
Odds: Liverpool +188; Draw +230; Arsenal +138