2-2 Dzeko 52min

came with an abundance of goals. If this year’s Champions League semi-finals have resembled basketball at times, you can hardly ask Liverpool to apologise for being the first team to reach 46 goals in a single Champions League campaign.

Their prolific scoring is only partly explained by the defensive frailties in front of them. The biggest cause is their irresistible movement and finishing.

Sadio Mane can be the least celebrated of the trident and still open the scoring stylishly. Georgi Wijnaldum can start the game badly and still head Liverpool’s second en route to a 7-6 aggregate victory. This was not a semi. It was an arms race.

Liverpool, of all clubs, know the value of not giving up, from the final in Istanbul 13 years ago. Eusebio Di Francesco’s team also know it well.

They fought to the end, almost chasing another lost cause down, until the final whistle released Liverpool from their “suffering”, as Klopp called it.

A minority of Roma’s fans had displayed the dark power of dysfunctional tribalism, turning the Stadio Olimpico into a security compound, a week after the appalling injuries suffered by a Liverpool supporter, Sean Cox, outside Anfield. But the majority

This kind of tension sits badly with the beauty of Rome, but maybe the two are indivisible. Turmoil is expressed in every Roman street, some of it merely emotional, other parts of it political and much darker. Football feeds this need for melodrama, but Roma were trying to feed it from an