WORLD DOMINATION
Robertson helps Liverpool to global crown in Qatar
THE title they really want, of course, is the one they used to claim as a matter of routine and have reasons to believe might actually be Anfield’s once more, after 30 long years. But ‘champions of the world’ is an achievement which will more than do for now.
It is an outcome you have to feel will fuel their drive for domestic supremacy.
A winning mentality indeed. Liverpool become the first club to hold the Champions League, Super Cup and the Club World Cup.
Yet it was a fight beyond anything the Premier League has thrown at them this season: a difficult, frustrating, attritional night against a steely Flamengo side operating to the relentless drumbeat of their rumbustious supporters.
Despite Jurgen Klopp’s side dominating and playing the better football, the game was in its 86th minute before they managed a shot on target.
And then, after 100 minutes, the breakthrough. Liverpool’s first ever goal in a final of this competition — that’s 369 minutes of football in all — and though Roberto Firmino will take the plaudits today, it should be said that its architect, Jordan Henderson, had been delivering through the eye of a needle all night.
A slip from Pablo Mari, the Brazilian full-back, allowed Henderson’s ball to travel forward through open space to Sadio Mane, who turned and laid back a ball which Firmino showed the composure to take across the retreating Mari to score.
This fixture was nothing like this the last time the two sides played. Zico has always remembered Flamengo’s 1981 win over Bob Paisley’s side being the only outcome the Brazilian team could ever foresee.
‘We knew we would win. Yes, they had conquered Europe, but failing did not come into our heads,’ he said a few years back.
But it was a different kind of Liverpool this time; a team led by a manager whose imagination for what this trophy might represent has transmitted such a powerful image of the team this past week, to the world audience more captivated by this trophy than British fans.
To hear Klopp speak on Friday of the Apollo II mission — ‘something that has never been done before, like landing on the moon’ — was to appreciate what he brings.
In their best moments here, Liverpool commanded the pitch with a pace of football which seemed alien to the Brazilian side.
It was a game in which Mo Salah and Firmino proved a clear and constant danger. Yet two criminal misses in the first five minutes began to look as if they would be very costly as the night wore on. They would have scrambled the minds of more fragile sides.
After Firmino took down Trent Alexander-Arnold’s 30-yard pass from deep on his chest, he sent a half-volley over the crossbar.
Henderson’s long ball over the top to Salah seemed to have unlocked another chance when the Egyptian shrugged off defenders and laid back into space, but Naby Keita fired over.
The Brazilians did find greater possession as the first half wore on and there was occasional opportunism from Flamengo. They twice exploited Alisson’s attempts to clear to fashion chances for the lively forward Bruno Henrique but but there was no material danger.
It didn’t help Liverpool’s attempt to put this game away that Mane struggled for so long to make an impression. The frustration was clear at the end of the first half when the Senegalese was held back at the outset of a counter-attack, wrestled the Flamengo defender to the ground and was booked. It seemed a dubious decision.
Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain’s departure on 75 minutes, clutching his right leg caught by Everton Ribeiro as they went up for a ball, was also damaging. He was on crutches as the players later celebrated.
Gabriel Barbosa managed to shoot from under Virgil van Dijk’s attentions, drawing a fine save from Alisson diving to his right. But Salah fastened onto an AlexanderArnold cross to the near post, to fire narrowly wide and it began to look as if Liverpool might fashion another of the late winners which have proved their indefatigability.
Henderson latched on to Salah’s lay-back and unravelled a shot from 20 yards which Diego Alves touched over. A penalty appeal was correctly turned down by VAR.
Mane, sent through by Henderson, was fouled as he struck a right-foot effort on the white line of the area, not inside it. In the ensuing chaos, the referee rescinded a yellow card.
But with the spirit which has come to define this side, Liverpool required 10 minutes of extra time to make the breakthrough.
Salah then curled a shot from the edge of the box which came close to wrapping up the night though it was a measure of the task that substitute Lincoln shot over when he could have equalised at the death.
‘I think it’s time for me and you to take over the world,’ stated one of the Liverpool banners last night, a line from The Courteeners. Now for the Premier League.