No stopping us Liverpool go an incredible 19 points clear after easy win at West Ham
Unbeaten league game No41, and when Jurgen Klopp comes one day to record this historic season in his memoirs, what will he remember of this rearranged Wednesday evening in east London against an opposition that seemed to assume that the outcome was inevitable?
Last time out in the league Liverpool were obliged to fight for the win until the end at Molineux, and yet for this game – first scheduled for December when Klopp’s players were at the Club World Cup – West Ham United might as well have sent them the three points in the post. Arguably the best attempt on the away goal came from Trent Alexander-arnold’s header that struck a post in the second half when the right-back seemed momentarily bemused by the rebound from an Alisson Becker save.
Otherwise this was the most familiar of outcomes on Liverpool’s trail of destruction in the Premier League, a 15th consecutive win in a 41-game unbeaten run that opens up a 19-point gap on second-placed Manchester City. It is the same number of points by which City themselves won the first of their two league titles under Pep Guardiola in 2018, and on this night above all it was possible to imagine that the rest had simply given up.
There was a goal from the penalty spot from Mohamed Salah in the first half and a splendid finish from Alex Oxlade-chamberlain in the second half, when Liverpool had broken the length of their pitch having successfully defended a West Ham corner. There were some fine saves from Alisson in the second half when West Ham had nothing to lose, although there was the distinct impression that this was a game that never quite began for the home team.
Klopp’s players have the knack of tuning into what it will take to beat any team on any given day, whether that is the two goals they needed last week at Wolverhampton Wanderers
or the much less required for West Ham. At some point they may well suffer a misjudgment, but they are now nine games from beating Arsenal’s 49-game unbeaten run.
There was a late cameo from teenager Curtis Jones, and the natural eagerness to impress of the young Liverpudlian gave Klopp the extra energy he was looking for.
At Molineux in the club’s under23s game against Wolves on the same night, another teenager, Harvey Elliott, scored with an overhead kick. These are golden days indeed for Liverpool.
The Liverpool manager said that the performance had not been on a par with those his team had summoned recently to beat the likes of Manchester United and Wolves and could not understand why 71 per cent possession equated to only five attempts on goal. He said that West Ham’s best moments had been gifted to them by Liverpool, a wayward Georginio Wijnaldum pass, and that “slapstick” header from Alexander-arnold.
“These boys,” he said, “I would give them my kids to look after, I trust them so much … they still make ridiculous mistakes. It’s about staying concentrated when you are constantly in charge.”
Klopp’s children, as he pointed out, are now older than most of his players, but the point stood. It is hard to keep on top all the time when the likes of West Ham are so far behind they can barely be discerned back in 17th place.
David Moyes was positive nonetheless. He could see improvements in his team that the regulars at the London Stadium might be less willing to discern, although he had to admit that there were basic mistakes. He had asked his team to keep the ball away from Virgil van Dijk at set-pieces and yet it was the Dutchman who won the header from the corner that set in motion the counter-attack that led to Liverpool’s second goal.
At right-back, Moyes gave a debut to the 19-year-old Jeremy Ngakia, a regular this season for the club’s under-23s, to give Pablo Zabaleta a breather. There was a pre-match introduction for Tomas Soucek, the Czech international midfielder signed from Slavia Prague whom Moyes was cautiously hopeful will be able to offer his team something this season.
Liverpool finally broke through when Salah lashed an unstoppable penalty past Lukasz Fabianski with 10 minutes of the first half remaining. The award of it had been reviewed by the video assistant referee Andre Marriner, who cannot have failed to notice that Divock Origi drew two separate fouls from Ngakia and then Issa Diop, before he went down.
West Ham were better in the second half and had four shots on target, including a header from Declan Rice that Alisson saved well. Before that, Liverpool scored a second after a wonderful move, the assist struck by Salah with the outside of his left foot. Manuel Lanzini was the last man with any chance of trying to stop Oxlade-chamberlain, whereupon the Argentine bounced off like a man unsuccessfully trying to board a departing bus.