An exclusive extract from Neil Atkinson‘s book ‘Transformer’ about the significance of Manchester United 0 Liverpool 5 at Old Trafford in 2021…
YESTERDAY was a great day.
Everything came together as you’d hope and the company before, during and after the game was different class.
Before, *before* though I was in the studio, reading the audiobook, which I am still finding stupendously difficult.
Completely coincidentally I was reading the chapter below – the only game in my 19 Key Games which is against Manchester United and focuses on Mo Salah. Because we made them none of our business, there were always other, bigger, more significant games.
Then we do that yesterday and reinforce the work that was done for nine years to create the gulf between us with a brand new flourish. A cherry on top.
The book about Jürgen Klopp isn’t in any way nostalgic – it’s a rejection of it. Football is about building blocks and Arne Slot has spoken brilliantly about building on last season. That’s all you can do. Build. And never wallow.
The desire to talk about Liverpool *and* Manchester United has led to a twisted sort of punditry this summer. It’s led by the obvious, but it gets everywhere and drives me mad.
The underlying numbers of last season’s Manchester United put them at the foot of the mid-table teams. Not eighth. Closer to 14th. Liverpool’s put them firmly in Manchester City and Arsenal’s company.
What we are building on is an 80 point-plus side whose underlying numbers were actually a little better and who suffered a significant injury crisis. Slot is right to caution about the load question of the Champions League, but the rest is something to build on.
Whereas any cursory glance suggested they were and are in a pit and the fella in charge has no tools to sort this other than a shovel.
Anyway, more to come. About The Reds now. About the book. About everything. Buzzing today.
The book is available here. The live shows are in:
Edinburgh
London… (HONESTLY WILL SOMEONE GIVE THIS CUP GAME A DATE?!)
Liverpool
Belfast
The moment could prove perfect – looking back at what got us here and imagining what could come next. You build and build and build. One foot in front of the other.
Anyway, Key Game 10. When we went there and won 5-0. Because there is us. There are other teams. And then there they are…
You pick your key games and then realise there is only one against Manchester United. If you’d have told 2012 me that 2024 me would be writing a book about Liverpool and there would barely be a mention of Manchester United, he would never have believed you. But the fact is: they just haven’t been relevant. What Klopp has done by being the one man prepared to aggressively chase Manchester City down is leave United in our rear view mirror.
I’ve tried. You can make an argument around the 7–0 home win of 2023 because it equals their all-time record defeat, including when they were Newton Heath. It’s important to think about that: their joint heaviest ever defeat. Two of the other three 7–0 defeats took place when Stanley Baldwin was Prime Minister. However, if anything, that fact actually makes me annoyed referee Andy Madley didn’t give a nailed-on last-minute penalty for a rash challenge by Luke Shaw out of human decency. It’s always worth surpassing a Baldwin. Stanley, Mike, Alec.
You can make a stronger argument about including the 2–1 defeat in March 2018 when the whole of our end celebrated that Liverpool team, leaving the Mancunians bemused as they packed ten men behind the ball and hung on for dear life. ‘Aren’t we winning?’ ‘Well, this one 90-minute battle, yes. But the war, that is moving our way. We can see it. Can’t you?’ I’d even considered the 2–0 in the Europa League in 2016 at Anfield, but Dortmund somewhat steals its thunder. Because even then Manchester United, even in 2016, they were weirdly ceasing to be our business.
But I settled for this one. Part of the reason why, is the context of it being the first big win – the first big away win – after we were all allowed to be together. The other reason why, is that one of the best things about being brilliant across these seasons was the realisation that sides would quickly cease to be your business apart from when you played them, and when Liverpool played Manchester United on 24 October 2021 they ceased to be our business by half-time, as we were 0–4 up, and instead became Manchester United Football Club, and emphatically their own business.
In the list of things that just don’t happen, in the list of football miracles, being 0–4 up against Manchester United at Old Trafford at half-time is pretty high. In a way, the 0–4 at half-time is more damning than the 7–0 final whistle in 2023. You could kid yourself that just gets out of hand, and you can tell yourself, ‘Anfield.’
For years Manchester United were competing for the biggest honours when we weren’t. But not once did they come to Anfield and score four goals in a half. Not once did they come to Anfield and make a show of us – the one time they threatened it we got out with a 3–3 draw. That isn’t to say they didn’t win, or to say they weren’t better. Just to say, they were humiliated around the world in the biggest game in club football by Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool.
By Mo Salah’s Liverpool.
Salah’s attitude to Manchester United has been consistently wonderful. He’s treated them with absolute contempt and scored goal after goal against them, received a series of bookings for taking his top off and, on this day, on this occasion, he bagged a hat-trick yet came off frustrated because Liverpool stopped playing. They just stopped. Chose to stop. Because they could. For Mo this was inconceivable. There were more goals to score, was more embarrassment to inflict, more world stage to strut on.
The Salah of this period could well be the greatest one. He played his best football, scored his best goals, scored as heavily as he did (with the exception of his first season) in the first half of 2021–22. He was in his element, at one with his teammates, and unplayable.
In a number of ways Salah is perceived to be quite inscrutable. The smile, the hair, the fact he doesn’t do many interviews – and when he does he seems especially thoughtful and careful with his words. His madcap agent. Even his faith, and its public nature, gives him an air of difference to other players.
But the truth of the matter isn’t that he is inscrutable through his actions. Instead, look at all those actions and find simplicity. For me, it’s that he is very straightforward. He fucking loves playing for Liverpool. He loves scoring goals for Liverpool. He loves seeing the chaos he causes. He loves being Liverpool’s Mo Salah, and nothing in his professional life has ever given him more joy. He loves his teammates. He loves training. He loved signing a new contract for Liverpool, and had even had jokes in the video.
It’s hard being Mo Salah. Your world-stage identity is constantly up for grabs. You are one of the world’s most famous Arabs and Muslims, which too many in the West see as the same thing when they very much aren’t. You are the world’s most famous Egyptian in a post-Arab Spring world. You are African. You are a very public father of daughters.
But when he pulls our shirt on he is Liverpudlian, with all that that entails. We love him, we loved him quickly, and we won’t stop. Because he scores all the goals, all the different type of goals, and because we see beyond all the reasons he needs to be careful, and we see the man delighted to play for the team we are lucky to watch.
Even when he shows his faith and his humility after he scores for Liverpool, I love it when he turns back to us and gives it one more, gives it a little bit of ‘get on me’, as the other thing about Mo Salah the Liverpudlian is we’ve watched him grow from a lad in his mid-twenties who fancied himself to a man in his early thirties who knows he’s incredible.
The year before we had gone away, been separated, we hadn’t been there to be with him and this whole period, 2021–22, felt like him making up for lost time. Jürgen Klopp’s team needed a crowd, but so too did its maestro and that is what we got that October day.
Mo Salah loves beating Manchester United because he is one of us, and he gets to show that to the world when we play them – and he gets to show it to us too.
They walked out when he made it five. Walked out because the show was over, the humiliation complete, their cameo in this book done and dusted. Jürgen Klopp had delighted Kenny Dalglish and destroyed Alex Ferguson. At the point this game ended there was no overriding sense that Liverpool could be 45 minutes from a title by May. Optimism abounded – how couldn’t it? – but the magic of 2021–22 was that there was always just about to be another gift, another moment to cherish. There was the satisfaction of this job being done, of them not being our business, of them being so far away from us, and the sheer visceral delight that we went to their place and made that crystal clear. It was a gift to the Liverpool-supporting world. In a way, it was the follow-on from those scenes of celebration and defiance in March 2018 when we lost. We knew then that this was us, this right here. We knew that day they wouldn’t really be our business for a good long while.
That October night, town was staggering. Every pub had people spilling out of it. As I have said before, I don’t have many photographs of me at the match, but I do have videos. That night we made a video in Pogue Mahone’s. Me, Fuad Hasan and everyone I could get my hands on. We did it as a live thing, with the backing of a directional microphone we loved. Fuad shot our Jürgen documentary 12 months later. He is very good at rolling with the punches, and this was something I just wanted to do, something I could just imagine.
It looks like an advert with a half-a-million pound budget. An advert for a pub, perhaps. An advert for a beer, maybe. It was meant to be an advert for a podcast. But, ultimately, it looks like an advert for being alive, for being part of something shinier than you are and it making you shinier still. It looks like an advert for visceral living, an advert for the promise of the greatest night out of your life. It is, in many ways, in one quick capsule form, the purest gift of what it all has been.
It looks like being back, knowing you’ve been away, but finding your way back; to the greatest little boozer and to ‘Sally MacLennane’.
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