A New Year’s Day nonsense at Anfield saw Liverpool extend their lead at the top of the Premier League and break xG records in a game they could have won by a dozen goals and yet might very easily not have won at all…
1. We weren’t going to do this. Eight o’clock kick-off? New Year’s Day? No thank you very much. Quick 800 words, about Mo Salah probably, and then back to bed. But sometimes the game decides for you. There’s simply no way to do that daft game any kind of justice in less than 3000 words anyway, so we might as well do 16 Conclusions on it. It’s only just slightly more than two conclusions for every Liverpool expected goal. Should be easy, this.
2. Salah remains the obvious starting point, though. Without him, Liverpool may well have lost this game. And that’s a game in which they broke the Premier League record for xG with a total damn near eight, which would be ludicrous against the worst team in the league, never mind a supposed rival.
Salah’s fingerprints were all over this Liverpool attacking performance and those absurd xG numbers. He never looked confident over the penalty that was saved in the first half, running at it like a man possessed and simply blasting it as hard as he possibly could. He’s better than that. We all know he’s better than that. And in the second half he showed it.
3. All the goals were either finished or created by Salah. He found himself down the middle to score the first, set Diogo Jota clear to square for Curtis Jones to score the second, assisted the third with a delightful outside-of-the-boot cross that Cody Gakpo’s finish didn’t quite match for aesthetics, and then far more calmly converted another penalty to finish the scoring and finally settle Liverpool nerves in the daftest of games.
4. It all takes Liverpool three points clear at the top of the table and five points clear of the two teams they will still consider their main rivals for this title. Everything about Liverpool this season has suggested a team not yet quite clinical enough, not yet quite settled enough to win a second title under Klopp. But the league has opened up for them and if nobody else is going to take advantage, then Liverpool might as well. There seems to be a widespread assumption that Manchester City simply go on one of their 14-match winning streaks now the new year is upon us and, sure, they might do that. But they might not. They’ve not looked quite this flawed for quite some time, and that means Liverpool – and Arsenal, and Villa, and heaven help us even Spurs – still absolutely have a chance to do something extraordinary this season.
5. But they are now going to have to get through the next month or so without Salah. If the stats tell us Rodri is the single most irreplaceable footballer in the Premier League, the vibes put Salah in the same bracket.
It’s Liverpool’s midfield that has undergone significant change in recent months, but it’s still in the final third where Liverpool are short of the very best team Klopp put together here. Darwin Nunez, Luis Diaz, Cody Gakpo and Diogo Jota all have their admirable qualities but it’s just not like it was with Roberto Firmino and Sadio Mane doing their thing alongside Salah.
Salah remains as good as ever – arguably better than ever – but where around him there was once clinical precision there is now chaos. It’s outrageously watchable and enormously entertaining but it’s not entirely reliable. Salah has been Liverpool’s talisman for a long time now, but he’s never looked more important than he does right now. Frankly, he’s never looked more important than he did specifically tonight. He was the one man to bring the necessary composure in the final third to ultimately turn Liverpool’s utter dominance of the game into something halfway similar on the scoreboard.
6. Liverpool’s attack may not now have the consistency it once boasted, but my word in the moments when it works it remains breathtaking. The opening goal was gorgeous, and pretty much impossible to deny the hosts deserved on the balance of play.
It came from a quick back-to-front break and like so many of Liverpool’s best bits over recent years saw all the front three prominently involved. We’re absolutely certain Darwin Nunez’s initial flick that set the ball rolling was meant for Salah but ended up behind him. Such is the chaos of Nunez – about whom much, much more later. It can go wrong when it goes right, and right when it goes wrong.
What he absolutely did right was square the ball for Salah to tap home after Luis Diaz had done his part. It was an obviously and straightforwardly correct decision to give the ball to Salah after the pattern of the move had seen the two swap positions, but plenty of players wouldn’t have taken it after missing the chances Darwin had missed and also calmly making obviously and straightforwardly correct decisions isn’t necessarily what Nunez is best known for. It was the one moment where Liverpool’s attack looked exactly like the good old days.
Mohamed Salah celebrates scoring a goal at Anfield.
7. It was a goal that should have settled Liverpool down. It had been coming from the earliest moments of the game and appeared sure to springboard the Reds to a comfortable victory against opponents who are, frankly, losing their way and watching a season disintegrate around them. Instead, within five minutes, Newcastle were improbably and ludicrously level as Anthony Gordon and Alexander Isak displayed the composure Liverpool had so often lacked.
Gordon was a peripheral figure for much of the game. He didn’t, in truth, appear fully fit. He seemed to be picking and choosing his moments to engage. Those moments were generally fleeting. But here he sensed his chance, skipping through a couple of challenges before sending Isak clear to steer the ball confidently past Alisson. At this point, there was significant potential for this to be One Of Those Nights in a title race where absolutely nobody seems willing or able to take charge.
8. Liverpool finally appeared to have sorted everything out when goals two and three arrived. A triple substitution shortly after Newcastle’s equaliser briefly had the effect of further destabilising Liverpool’s chaotic attacking play as Dominik Szoboszlai, Diaz and a visibly disappointed Nunez made way. But Gakpo and Jota in particular would prove integral in Liverpool finally getting the scoreline to offer some kind of meaningful reflection on the way the game played out. Jota latched on to Salah’s defence-breaking pass to lay on the second for Jones, and Gakpo was the right man at the right time to convert Salah’s genius cross. We would dearly love to know Nunez’s honest reaction to seeing Gakpo’s scuffy miskick bamboozle Martin Dubravka and nestle in the bottom corner. Nunez wouldn’t be human if he weren’t slightly sickened by it.
9. He really is an astonishing player to watch. So much of what he does is brilliant. So many of his touches and flicks to bring other players into the game are truly high level. He makes the right runs, takes up the right positions, never stops trying, wins the ball back high up the field but he just misses chance after chance after chance after chance. In all, Nunez had eight attempts on goal at a rate slightly better than one every eight minutes. Some were clear-cut, none were half-chances. Newcastle’s players managed five attempts on goal between the lot of them. Even by Nunez standards, trudging off the pitch with 63 minutes gone and no goal to his name boggled the mind. It’s almost impressive.
10. And yet for all that near inexplicable failure to get on the scoresheet, Jurgen Klopp was right to praise Nunez’s overall contribution. There’s no point pretending the lack of goals at the end of it all isn’t any kind of problem, but Nunez still personifies perhaps better than anyone how Klopp wants his Liverpool team to play. Newcastle maybe down in the dumps, but this is no mug team. This is a team that outperformed Liverpool last season and deservedly finished above them to claim Champions League football at the Reds’ expense. Tonight, Liverpool humiliated them in every single facet of the game bar the final scoreline. And all of that had a lot to do with Nunez, who exemplified the hard-pressing all-action football Klopp demands.
It’s easy to focus on the failure of Nunez in particular but also Liverpool in general to make the scoreline reflect their dominance, but it’s worth taking a minute to note that dominance in and of itself. These teams started the season as direct rivals with similar goals and ambitions. There is cavernous distance between them now. Liverpool overran and overpowered Newcastle, who somehow clung on by their fingernails and, encouraged by Liverpool’s profligacy, started after about half-an-hour to tentatively consider maybe having the occasional attack of their own.
11. The sheer absurdity of the game and the general media tendency to both a) focus on Liverpool and b) give Newcastle an easy ride (we’re clearly very guilty of ‘a’ here having only just got round to discussing the other team in tonight’s equation) means Newcastle – and Eddie Howe – might just escape the reaction they probably deserve. This really was alarmingly bad, a game that on another night could have yielded a truly humiliating scoreline.
There is mitigation in Newcastle’s absentees and the stresses and strains of a club reacquainting itself with elite European football, but the scale of the regression this season is horribly alarming.
Allowing 34 shots on goal and an xG north of 7.5 would be bad enough for a team seeking to play boldly on the front foot come what may. But those are the kinds of numbers to make even Ange Postecoglou with nine men and no centre-backs wince and think about maybe trying something different. Newcastle gave up those numbers while pretty much trying to play low-block-and-counter. Last summer already looks like an enormous, missed opportunity for a club that found itself ahead of schedule on a quest for world domination. Reaching the Champions League does not come easy in this division, and there were no guarantees that it would now become the norm; what Newcastle had was the resources to make that more likely. They didn’t really do anywhere near enough.
12. The relatively flattering scoreline cannot be allowed to detract from how serious this is getting for Newcastle. The ‘Big Seven’ chat already looks faintly ludicrous with Newcastle sitting 10 points adrift of fifth and even the possibility of a Champions League place next season. They are mid-table and look like a mid-table team. They’re now only a point above Chelsea and have now in the last month alone been thoroughly outclassed by Everton, Tottenham and now Liverpool as well as beaten soundly enough by Luton and Nottingham Forest. The manager at any other big club would be in deep, deep trouble after a ruinous run of one win in eight games that has seen their league season unravel, their European campaign end at the earliest possible moment and a glorious chance to end a decades-long trophy drought carelessly tossed away in the Carabao. Howe has done so many good things to turn Newcastle around, but he really could have few complaints if a club whose ambitions are sky-high now decides to look elsewhere. He has shown an unwillingness or inability – or both – to manage the extra workload that comes with combining Premier League and Champions League commitments, and that is perhaps the most damning thing for a manager seeking to prove he has what it takes to lead a club at that level.
And it may very well get worse before it gets better: their next two league games – after an FA Cup trip to Sunderland that suddenly looks awful trappy – are against Manchester City and Aston Villa. January reinforcements may come for Newcastle, but they may come too late for Howe.
13. Back to this game, and those penalties. Straightforward, this, really. Liverpool’s first penalty is a clear penalty. Gary Neville’s snap assessment on Sky Sports co-commentary that Luis Diaz had looked for it or gone down easily had little merit and was one that he spent the rest of the night slowly but studiously backing away from without ever quite admitting he was wrong. The contact on Diaz was significant. He tried to keep his feet – as you would expect any player to do when his next touch is potentially a shot on goal from four yards out – but was unable to do so. His stumble thus appeared late – and was inevitably exacerbated by replays – but not in any way manufactured. A player need not be taken clean off his feet for a foul to be committed, and casting aspersions on players who try and fail to remain upright has the exact opposite effect those doing it would apparently want: if trying to stay on your feet has people suggesting players have gone to ground late, they’re simply going to be even more likely to go to ground artificially quickly. Nobody should want that. An impeded player should absolutely have two chances – to ride the foul or be awarded the penalty for it – and players who attempt to take advantage of the first option should be applauded and encouraged.
14. All that said, Diogo Jota’s antics for the second penalty are absurd and it is no penalty. Just as contact need not wipe a player out to become a foul, so it also stands at the other end of the spectrum that contact does not instantly constitute a foul. ‘Contact with consequence’ is the phrase that’s been bandied around this season and it went out the window here. Jota does go to ground late, he does make a conscious decision to do so, and he does so having felt the lightest brush of contact from Dubravka despite having the goal at his mercy. We can understand that it’s difficult for VAR to overturn a decision when there is contact, but we’re not talking about a fine edge through to the wicketkeeper here. Jota was not thrown off balance or impeded meaningfully. He could have stayed on his feet; he chose not to.
15. It was harsh on Dubravka, one of few Newcastle players to emerge from a chastening and damp evening with reputation enhanced. He joins Guglielmo Vicario (on a couple of occasions) as a keeper who leaves the field with four goals against his name and yet a compelling claim of being man of the match. In all, he made 10 saves, including one from a penalty, a couple from one-on-ones, and a couple more from perilously close range. He was a blameless bystander for the goals he did concede and answered plenty of the questions raised against him as Newcastle considered bringing in reinforcements in light of Nick Pope’s continued absence. The world’s best goalkeeper was in the other goal tonight, but swapping them would have made absolutely no difference to the outcome. Newcastle fans are entitled to ask for more from their defense and midfield after that, but they could ask no more of their stand-in keeper.
16. Spotter’s badge to the cameraman who located Jurgen Klopp’s dropped wedding ring on the sodden Anfield turf and spared the Liverpool boss some awkward questions. There were plenty of times during this game as Liverpool spurned their chances that Klopp looked decidedly miffed. But that was nothing like the terror etched across his face in those few panicked post-match seconds.
Credit: Football 365.
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