Liverpool 2-0 Villarreal (Estupinan o.g 53′, Mane 55′)
ANFIELD — You make your own luck. At least three times over the course of 90 minutes, managers at every level will point their fingers to their foreheads to emphasise the importance of sticking to principles. Do what you know works often enough, powering through the wall when you aren’t sure if it’ll work at all, and it will work again. It’s when you stray from the path that things get a little lost. Liverpool get to skip the “wall” stage these days – they know this works.
You use up your own luck too. The Unai Emery blueprint is a simple one: defend narrow, sit deep, provoke crosses into your penalty area and back yourself to clear every single one. Their only adjustment is in how courageous they choose to be on the counterattack: do they attack in ones, twos or threes? Or noughts, as on occasion at Anfield.
It didn’t happen against Bayern Munich, when it could have. Villarreal stayed in sight and eventually salvaged a night that may never come around again. It did happen at Anfield. One speculative cross. One unfortunate deflection. One flap of a glove, fractionally mistimed and thus the difference between useful and useless. From that point, damage limitation is the only option.
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Villarreal are spoilers, smothering higher-class opponents. They are frustrators too, and in that strategy lies their best hope of victory. If a team – spurred on by its home crowd – gets antsy and demands a greater commitment to attack. There are good reasons for this team only losing one of their previous 12 away games in Europe.
But then what do you want from a team with roughly a quarter of Liverpool’s annual revenue and a wage bill that is £234m less than their opponents. As in life, in football: the greatest privilege of wealth is choice. The best football to play as an underdog is the most effective form.
The familiarity of this team and manager also provides reason enough to rub the eyes in disbelief. Emery was castigated for his perceived Arsenal failure. Giovani Lo Celso, Juan Foyth and Etienne Capoue all hit different marks on the Tottenham flop spectrum. Francis Coquelin was temporarily divisive at the Emirates before virtually everyone agreed he was not fit for their ultimate ambitions. This conglomerate of the decried were simply desperate for a natural home; Castellón is their castle.
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Instead, the enjoyment of their football is certainly compartmentalised – the neutral must source their joy from select moments. Like when Villarreal attempt to pass their way through one of the most intense presses in world football and are successful roughly 80 per cent of the time; enough to keep you guessing. Or when Gerónimo Rulli decides that a Superman dive and punch is better than a simple catch. One flap too many for him.
Villarreal needed perfection and perfection is impossible against this Liverpool team. It isn’t just that they have so, so many weapons to hurt you in attack, with full-back crossing to full-back and a passing central midfielder who could win a game of Operation with his right foot. It isn’t just that they are so relentless without the ball, forcing an opponent to not only be perfect with their action but also their thought.
It’s that Liverpool’s manic brilliance, those bangs and whistles of unpredictability, combined with a serene patience that comes from total confidence in their process. You can stop us time and time again, but we will chip away until a crack appears and we will smash it with extreme force when it does. They wind you with jabs and pepper you with hooks. They show you the ball under the cup and still it ends up in their pocket.
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This tie is technically not over, but forget the technicality. Liverpool haven’t lost by a scoreline that would even force extra-time in Spain for over a year. In the final throes of the match, each Villarreal central defender sliced the ball into touch. They were weary. They were a little broken. They have led their team to great overachievement, but Liverpool don’t deal in romance these days. They deal in unpredictable, fabulous tricks to achieve predictable results.
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