We won this game in the first half, so I’m not particularly bothered that the second half wasn’t the best. I don’t think this is going to be team that regularly hits five or six even when the opponent is ripe for the picking, I think we’ll see more of this sort of thing, just managing the game.
Which is fine, but I have no doubt that we could have smashed Bournemouth if we’d maintained full intensity. I get why we didn’t though and I’m happy with what we saw in the first half. It was excellent.
I’m happy that Slot finally decided to give Darwin a start too. A week too late, and I wasn’t sure he wasn’t going to do it at all, but it was the right call as Jota hasn’t been pulling up any trees and you can’t just leave Nunez on the bench indefinitely (the same applies to other players too). Slot has been charged with getting the best out of him and presumably lots of work has been done on that, whether it’s on the training ground or via video sessions (hopefully both), but you need to keep his head up and make him feel involved, so this start was a no brainer for me. But then I thought that a week ago. And then again in midweek. Finally it came, and it paid off.
But before I get to the Nunez wonder goal, there’s a lot of other stuff to cover, mostly involving his mate ‘Lucho’. He’s been great so far this season but the first half of this game saw him take it to another level. He was absolutely fucking electric every time he got the ball.
He’d already gone close twice before he eventually scored. The first was a run past a couple of defenders that ended with a tasing drive that Arrizabalaga tipped over. The second was an incredible run from out wide that took him past three or four defenders before he was denied by the keeper again. He could have squared that to Nunez but I didn’t have a problem with him shooting there because there’s just as much chance of him scoring as there is of him completing the cross when the keeper and defenders are there to possibly cut it out. It would have been one of the goals of the season if he’d finished it, so I’m fine with him going it alone there.
We were looking good and playing some lovely stuff, but we did have a major scare after only three minutes when Semenyo slid in and scored at the Kop end after a mis-hit shot by Kluivert. I expected a flag to go up but it didn’t, so I was fearing the worst as they don’t usually get those wrong. Turns out that the Main Stand lino just wasn't very good and that wasn’t the only thing he missed.
I expected the goal to be given and had resigned myself to that, but all of a sudden our entire subs bench leapt up and started shouting at the lino that he should have flagged. They were watching the replay on the iPad and they were so sure it was offside that I knew then it would be disallowed. Eventually that was confirmed and the celebrations from the away end were cut short. It's fine though, the last time they were on Merseyside gave them all the celebratory moments they need.
I still think we’d have gone on to win even if that had stood but you never know, so it was a big moment. The crowd definitely got a lift from it and I thought the atmosphere was decent in the first half. That was obviously helped by the fact we cored three goals in 12 minutes or something, but I also think it was because the team were playing at a higher tempo than we saw last week.
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