Don’t mind the picky purists, Reds deserve praise aplenty
They have defensive frailties but Klopp’s side are winning arms race at the other end of field
MARK LAWRENSON recalled that the Roma manager knew his side were beaten in the 1984 final here when Liverpool’s players walked around the pitch singing a Chris Rea song. No team that confident was going to go home without the European Cup.
Back then, Liverpool had class, history, aura, built up over two decades. This time they came to Rome as revelations. And they came with 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 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.
Georgi Wijnaldum can start the game badly and still head Liverpool’s second to make the score 7-3 on aggregate. Ten goals in 115 minutes of semi-final action.
Anyone who thought that would be the end of it has not been paying attention.
After the break, Edin Dzeko equalised to complete his record of scoring home and away against Barcelona and Liverpool. Make that 7-4 – 11 goals.
Why not. This was not a semifinal. It was an arms race.
Liverpool, of all clubs, know the value of not giving up, from the final in Istanbul 13 years ago.
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 Liverpool supporter Sean Cox outside Anfield.
PRESSURE
But the majority brought a more benign pressure to bear on Liverpool, the new hot ticket in European football.
There was a strange kind of madness about this tie, with Liverpool losing their No 2 coach, Zjleko Buvac, who left the party just as it was getting really good, Steven Gerrard being courted by Rangers and away fans having to observe elaborate travel plans to ensure their safety.
Outside the ground, the notorious bridges over the Tiber stood like crossing points from a nightmare, even with the swarms of Carabinieri, the military police.
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 epic and much darker.
Football feeds this need for melodrama, but Roma were trying to feed it from an impossible position, against opponents who were also expected to fall long before the semi-finals.
The script was that Virgil van Dijk’s defensive unit would pick up where Mo Salah, Mane and Roberto Firmino left off at Anfield.
Liverpool would probably pinch an away goal to ease the pressure, but the main aim was stopping Roma doing what they did to Barcelona in the last round.
Roma’s fans came here thinking a second miracle was possible.
Liverpool fought against their own belief that a 3-0 Roma win was impossible, given the effervescence of their own front-three, which reflects the modern cult of forwards working in gangs of three.
Seldom has a 5-2 starting point felt so tantalising, and Liverpool could never relax on their seemingly commanding position. The threat was always there.
Salah, meanwhile, now knows the pointlessness of not celebrating goals against former clubs.
At Anfield, Salah was apologetic about his two first-half goals, raising his palms and avoiding the group hug.
His reward was to be jeered early on by Roma fans on his old hunting ground – a more rational approach, if a little ungracious.
Roma have been derided as
impostor semi-finalists but you could hardly question their spirit as they chased the game from 7-4 down.
They pressed and hustled, hounding Liverpool’s two young full-backs, Andy Robertson and Trent Alexander-Arnold, and giving Van Dijk the biggest test of his Liverpool career, four months in.
Not unreasonably, Roma went direct, whipping diagonal balls forward and trying to create mayhem in Loris Karius’s penalty box.
With eight minutes left, Klopp sent Ragnar Klavan on as a fifth defender in place of Mane, but even then the tension was maintained – and intensified when Radja Nainggollan struck from long range with five minutes left.
Now it was 7-5 to Liverpool, and the Roma crowd were re-energised.
In this crazy tie, two Roma goals in five minutes was not such an outlandish prospect.
Desperation, of different kinds, gripped both teams. Roma kept coming.
Liverpool groped for some kind of defensive shape that might keep them out.
In added time, a penalty. Roma 4-2 up on the night.
Football ceases to be academic at this point. It becomes a frantic battle of wills. You either block or break.
Purists will say that no tie with so many goals can be awarded high marks, even with this much tension. But it’s a bit too early in Liverpool’s return as European heavyweights to be throwing academic caveats at them.
They were forged by fire in this tumultuous semi-final, which propels them into a final against another team, Real Madrid, who made it to Kiev the hard way.
Liverpool deserve a stroll round the pitch and a song. (© The Daily Telegraph, London)