THREE of the goals are gorgeous. Drop dead gorgeous.
Language struggles for the other, for Oxlade-Chamberlain and Liverpool’s second.
There isn’t an aesthetic plus point it doesn’t score double in. There are two or three Shakespearean sonnets where he compares the beauty of a woman to a ball hitting the underside of the bar bouncing and hitting the roof of the net. I know that sentence stretches plausibility; no woman is that good looking.
Outside of the foot. Top corner. From the D. Keeper unable to dive, left bemused. Everything, every last thing. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Immediately a gif, immediately a meme, a love letter, an announcement, a sonnet.
The first drilled back by Oxlade-Chamberlain too. A daisy cutter, something unfashionable, something rare. Just passed into the corner with perhaps the slightest deflection. It felt great but proved merely a warmup.
The move and finish for Sadio Mane’s goal was terrific. The speed of the football something that by then Genk couldn’t deal with. They dealt well for an hour but Liverpool don’t let the pace drop, that pace you can’t live with. Suddenly Liverpool ping it again and this time the gambles of Genk don’t pay off.
You can’t allow a team of our quality to have the ball on the edge of your area this much. You need to be good and lucky every time. Our lads need to be good and lucky once.
I made an involuntary groan on the fourth. The turn was filthy. Not so much a romantic sonnet as a dirty limerick or a pornographic tale. Something from the back room of a club.
It was a game punctuated by goals. Liverpool didn’t play brilliantly per se, they just played well and made it happen when it could. There was an economy to The Reds and they lined up and approached the game as much the better side. They knew they’d win the moments.
Much may be made of the space found on the break from Genk but Liverpool are leaving those traps deliberately, backing their centre backs two on two and mostly vindicated in doing so, however much it might make your heart race.
They would perhaps like greater pressure on the ball when it falls apart in midfield or lanes being cut off, but the vulnerability is deliberate at which point it begs the question as to whether it is a vulnerability or a trap.
You can only pick 11 men; you can’t cover all the pitch. It takes courage to decide that the bits you won’t cover are in your own half on the break. It takes brains too.
Often given, occasionally not but would be called back, Liverpool’s line worked well after the first 10 minutes. They knew where to be and it is only really as the game draws to a close and Genk get their consolation that Liverpool’s defenders truly fail, Dejan Lovren having a lovely sit down as the ball hits the back of the net.
Through the game James Milner is redoubtable yet again, though fortunate to see an equaliser chalked off. Nothing he could do about that, though. The lad attacks it and him. Andy Robertson owns his flank. Lovren does well until the goal. But Virgil van Dijk is everything. Just everything. He makes central defence look a doddle.
In terms of playing the actual football Naby Keita is better than Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain for an hour but the actual football doesn’t matter when you own the moments.
The frustration against Manchester United was that you only needed to play really well for five minutes. Today Liverpool showed that perhaps you only needed to play really well for 30 seconds. Fabinho the most impressive midfielder if you ignore the most impressive things imaginable in a football match.
You can’t. Liverpool are both glorious and efficient. They are in the results business and in the beautiful moments business. It is one hell of a combination and shows why this side is so, so hard to live with.
They ask questions all the way through a game, they don’t make it easy. Genk could live with them until they couldn’t and then it just all had to be walked around and marvelled at.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Who cares about them when you have autumnal nights? Champions League football and the mighty boys in red marching on.
These are the days, these are the nights.
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A thing of beauty is a joy forever
The Ox’s goal?
Yep, glorious stuff again. Great to see Ox and Keita strutting it. We might need them to reproduce it again, even off the bench, against Spurs because we need and demand those points and I think we’ll get them because when we are on our game there’s frankly no one better. The days and the nights indeed.
Thought Naby Keita was a joy to watch.
Sets the tempo keeps things moving, ticking-over.
He is a master of “nicking the ball”.
Retaining possession when winning the ball back.
Some great goals. One memorable.
Solid result.
Bloody hell, this is pornographic piece in itself that is to be marvelled at.
Personally I felt it wasn’t a trap or any of that romantic nonsense, it was our lads all wanting to rush on past their players, whether we had the feckin ball or not. I bet at half time that Klopp didn’t see the funny side of this as we more disciplined in the second half and not so much excited Yorkshire Terrier just scampering round with no idea why.
Good news is we won an away fixture in the CL and some of our lads (who needed it) got 90 mins of footy. We have to do these in the return and then beat Napoli and then we can forget about the CL until Feb 2020… No easy task, especially if we play naive footy, no matter how feckin sexy it looks.
He’s an unusual player, Oxlade-Chamberlain. In a good sense of course. Not many like him. A midfielder who is as direct as a winger and strikes the ball like a forward. He doesn’t play midfield in the traditional sense and on nights like the last it is to our benefit.
His goal was the sort of thing I imagine someone like Pablo Aimar doing at youth level. An impudent, audacious piece of brilliance. I’ve never seen a goal like it. I don’t see why I can’t say it’s one of the best goals I’ve ever seen.
Our goals were those of a supreme football team. Mane’s goal showed a front three at the top of its game. In perfect harmony. I still don’t understand how he chipped that ball over the keeper with no backlift whatsoever. There just wasn’t the space between him and the keeper to do it.
Fun match, really enjoyable. Class review.
Lest we forget, there was a time when our defense going into the Champions League consisted of some combination of Skrtel, Sakho, Lovren, and Kolo Toure. Out wide, there was Albie Moreno, Jose Enrique, Glen Johnson, and Javier Manquillo. In goal, it was Mignolet or Brad Jones.
Lest we forget.
I recall these names when I see a counterattack bearing down on us. Or when the opposition earn corner. These days, my heart rate remains as flat as if I were gazing at the sea. My thoughts occasionally drift to the images of Skrtel pulling a shirt into unrecognizable contours, Sakho flailing on the ground like a fish on pavement. But, like clouds, these memories drift by aimlessly and without edge, soon enough forgotten.
Lest we forget. Not for the gnarled plaisure of recounting a horror, but so that we can fully appreciate the magnificence before our eyes. Among men, giants. Lest we forget.
I was trying my damnedest to forget those days. the nervous twitch was almost gone, the nightmare subsided… and then your post, in glorious technocolour brings it all back….
WHY FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS DECENT DID YOU DO THAT TO US???!!!
I will now have to go and watch endless hours of us scoring all manner of goals under Klopp and VvD just being himself to remove these images you made us all recount.
Were not those love sonnets dedicated to a “fair youth” ? Some believe the mystery boy to be one Will Hughes , presumably the blonde haired lad currently plying his trade at Watford.
Regarding the gung- ho tactics , I got the impression Klopp wanted to get the game settled in the first half hour and rest up. And thought we were good enough to do it.
“Walter, you are just an echo of a world I knew so long ago” ( Raymond Douglas Davies). Loved the Sakho fish analogy .