FIRMINO BURIES BURNLEY:
Liverpool sub scores with his first touch
NO SPRINT across the turf this time but behind his muted punch of the night air, there was still the sense of unmitigated delight for Jurgen Klopp, whose decision to leave the artillery out had briefly looked like it might have handed an advantage to the insuperable machine that is Manchester City.
His side had spluttered, laboured and gone a goal behind against a Burnley side playing as if their professional reputations depended on it when Roberto Firmino arrived from the bench with Mo Salah.
Three minutes later, he had sealed the win which takes Liverpool to their highest points total after 15 games of a top-flight season. And still they are not top.
The Pennine rain had been hammering down all day and Sean Dyche needed all the inhospitality this place could muster. It’s been a long, hard autumn, the Burnley defence which seemed near unbreachable at times this year is anything but and it’s hard to avoid the sense that the team have been found out. They’d collected 16 points fewer than at the same stage last season as they headed into the match.
But Liverpool’s feeling that this might be one of their easier evenings — making seven changes and beginning a match with neither Mo Salah, Sadio Mane nor Roberto Firmino for the first time since May 2017 — was rapidly put to bed.
If there was a bright spot from a difficult, feisty first half in which they delivered the full Lancashire, then it was Naby Keita. The 23year-old played with his head up, providing the vision and guile which was generally in short supply, from a Klopp perspective.
The unfamiliar front line could not deliver, early on. It was the bad old Daniel Sturridge on show. A James Milner ball across the area slipped under his foot and into touch. A well-weighted Keita pass into the left-hand channel of the penalty box also escaped him.
It was Burnley who created the chances, squeezing possession out of the visiting team and seizing on scrappiness. They should have been at least a goal to the good by the interval.
It seemed like an enormous moment, 10 minutes in, when a ball over the top was navigated by Ashley Barnes to Chris Wood, who needed three touches to get a shot away — an eternity and time enough for Liverpool’s Joe Gomez to clear the danger.
Gomez had borne the brunt of Burnley’s physical approach, as Kieren Westwood cleared him into touch in the opening minutes. A similar challenge from Ben Mee just beyond the 20-minute mark saw him carried from the field with damage to his left ankle.
Dyche’s players continued to provide the goalscoring threat. A 35-yard effort from Phil Bardsley flew a few feet wide of Alisson’s right-hand post. And as the first period ticked down, Westwood’s sublime volleyed left-foot connection on a Robbie Brady cross hit the back of the net, only for the forward to be marginally — and correctly — ruled offside.
It was moribund from Liverpool — nowhere near the requirement in a Premier League season where maintaining pace with City does not allow the remotest slip. Klopp had surely told them so, because they stepped it up considerably when the second half started.
It was Joe Hart who temporarily kept Burnley in the contest, with two saves of the highest order. The first came after Sturridge finally delivered something of quality from his garish pink boots, forcing the keeper to leave and parry away, two-handed.
Keita quickly burst deep into Burnley territory and unleashed a right-foot effort which required something even finer from Hart: an athletic leap which touched the shot on to the post and behind.
And then, at the other end of the field, evidence of the unremitting challenge of the domestic campaign. A corner from the Burnley right reached the head of James Tarkowski, who sent a header into the six-yard box. Wood found a half-connection and Alisson had only half-gathered the ball when Westwood arrived with a shot which took it out of control, allowing Jack Cork to tap in.
However, it took only eight minutes for Liverpool to level. Keita, in dangerous territory again, located Divock Origi, whose layback was collected and guided in off the right-hand post by Milner.
The cavalry arrived five minutes past the hour — Salah and Firmino for Alberto Moreno and Origi. Virgil van Dijk accelerated into the Burnley box and navigated Trent Alexander-Arnold’s free-kick across the six-yard box for Firmino to tap home with his first touch.
A magisterial intervention from Salah helped wrap things up. After Alisson saved athletically from Mee, and set off a counter-attack that ended with the Egyptian lofting a sublime pass into the path of Xherdan Shaqiri, the Swiss ran in to drive the ball home and keep City in Liverpool’s sights.