Liverpool 5 Arsenal 5 (Oct 30 2019)

[Tj hooker]

1 minute ago, aws said:

Yes. Been there a few times as it's great walking across it when there's not too many people about. Crossed it steering a canal boat once and nearly shit myself until I realised it's actually impossible for a boat to fall over the lip. 

Walked over it many times as a kid never took a barge though ,  it's a truly wonderful piece of engineering especially when you consider when it was built .

Only lived about 10 minutes away then. 

[deiseach]

I had identified this game a long way out as a chance to go to Anfield on the cheap, and with only 45,000 going to the Chelsea game in the third round last year I thought it would be easy enough. Better still, it would be a chance to take our six-year-old son and the thought of my wife getting to take him the game was a pleasant one.

 

Champions of Europe though (which will be a recurring theme) and it sold out before I had gotten my arse into gear. Never mind, my brother-in-law gets two tickets for every game going so I messaged him saying how pleasant a thought it was and could he do us a solid. 

 

Silence. The only match communication I got was to tell me he’d gotten me one of those £9 tickets available to those with an L postcode, thus overcoming my objections to the price of going. Which is nice, and showed he listened to me on that score. Pity he seemed to have missed the whole can-your-sister-and-only-nephew/godson-go thing. 

 

It all changed around lunch time on the day of the match, as his match-going friend had decided not to go. This is a frequent occurrence and he generally takes the hit making his the most expensive ticket around. He saw the chance to avoid that this time and I put aside my irritation at the whole affair for the chance for my wife to see our son’s face at the game. Except she was still recovering from a nasty bout of vomiting the day before so, after multiple are-you-sure pleas on my part, it was me who ended up in block 203 with the boy. It took several fistfuls of [oldfart]StarburstsOpal Fruits[/oldfart] to make him sit still during the warmup, but he got increasingly wide-eyed as it went on and was well up for it by the time You’ll Never Walk Alone (rather abruptly) finished, at which point I was congratulating myself at being the bestest dad in the world.

 

Then I got the second post-Madrid shock: no-one sat down in the Kop. It’s rare I’ve seen this in a domestic fixture and certainly never in the League Cup, but we’re the Champions of Europe and it was a collective extended wanking gesture to the Arsenal fans at the other end. It was a disaster for me as the boy had to stand to see anything and by the half-hour point was utterly exhausted. 

 

It was just as well the football was so entertaining, and another positive was the third example of the new dispensation. I don’t think I’ve ever been at a game where the atmosphere was so goddamn cheerful. I know this was the low-pressure environment of the League Cup, but I’ve previously been to seven games at Anfield in the competition and there were prolonged bouts of angst at every one of those games. Not this time. Oh sure, there were the outbursts of FFS at bad passes, but the atmosphere was relentlessly upbeat. So this is what it’s like to support a team who are good, consistently good. Quite the revelation.

 

It probably falls under the heading of ‘fools seldom differ’ rather than ‘great minds think alike’, but I was having many of the same thoughts as Dave during the game. Keita was a tremendous letdown. Maybe he’d be great in a team whose ambitions are to get into the top four, but there’s been little to suggest he’s the type of player to cause a crowd to merrily treat adversity as just one of those things on the way to inevitable victory. Neco Williams, on the other hand, was tremendous. Constantly on the front foot and probing for weaknesses, I can see him slotting in at right-back when Trent moves into the midfield. I don’t think Keita will be standing in the way of that move. More generally, it really is a treat watching a Liverpool team that has Klopp’s influence all through it. You can see the coaching, with players taking the ball on one foot and leaning towards passing it with the same stride. The one regret I have over my ‘boycott’ is not being able to watch Van Dijk and Fabinho strut their stuff. Of all the things that are lost from watching football on television, the skills that those two players in particular are not fully represented. I’d even argue that I now have a better impression of what they bring from a game where they didn’t play. Virg and Fab in place of Keita and Van Den Berg? In the words of the Bunk from The Wire: “oh Jesus, oh my pants are wet”.

 

Another thing you can’t get from the TV, not even of the Arsenal Fan variety, is how badly broken teams are by the Klopp experience. You referenced how they were swinging their dicks around at 4-2 and 5-4 like they were beating a team with the Holy Trinity up front rather than a bunch of kids. Speaking of previous League Cup games I’ve seen here, the closest comparison was the reaction of Grimbsy fans way back in 2001. The jealousy fam oozed out of every pore blud. At the great manager Liverpool have and whom they might have had had the stars been aligned and the owners on the case, at the six-times Champions of Europe, at the ground where their last decent assault at scaling Mount European Cup came a cropper. I imagine more than a few of them wept bitter tears yesterday after the Wolves game at what they rarely had at Highbury and never will at the Emirates.

 

Still, it looked like my boy’s first visit to Anfield was going to come a cropper as well. He had dozed on our seats for a few minutes near the end and this seemed to give him his second wind, so he was watching again when your boy Williams got in around the back and confirmed that the quality I had seen wasn’t an illusion, picking out Big Div whose scissor kick was good but hardly a worldy. It didn’t need to be to beat the clown in the Arsenal goal. I think you understated how crap this bozo is. Goals 3-5 were all hit straight at him and he has to save at least one of them to be considered anything better than a table football goalkeeper. The roar that greeted that fifth goal was as if it was the winner, and the way the Arsenal players fell to their knees suggested they thought as much as well.

 

Provided the pelanty shootout took place at the Kop. All eyes on the ref, he points towards our way…again, not hard to imagine shoulders sagging in the away end. I love penalty shootouts and so did the boy, which makes sense. So simple even a six-year-old can understand. Ahem. They’ve been kind to Liverpool over the years as well, although before the Super Cup win over Chelsea it was looking like the mojo had been lost. No such worries here as everyone clinically took their chance. The only one who worried me was Rhian Brewster, who took two big gulps that were even noticed by Rob Hawthorne in commentary. Nothing wrong with his kick though, low and hard into the corner. The only one who let it all get to him was Dani Ceballos, and we don’t need to be all amateur psychologist about him, he told the world how he didn’t relish the Anfield pressure cooker. 

 

Job’s a good un and all done and dusted before 10pm. The 7.30 kickoff and the lack of extra time had been a consideration before bringing the boy. I am looking forward to making his friends insanely jealous when he goes back to school tomorrow – and that’s just the Liverpool fans, which happens to be most of them. Enjoy it while it lasts, kids. I know I am.