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PMaybe, if we really tried hard, we could imagine ways tonight could have been even better for Liverpool than in reality. A hat-trick from Alisson. Such an uplifting performance that it instantly healed Virgil van Dijk’s knee injury. Takumi Minamino got up from the bank to announce that he had invented a vaccine for Covid-19. But we’re holding on to the straws here. The full-time smiles and laughter said it all – this was Liverpool Christmas, and in the traditional sense instead of level 3 lockdown.
The scoring debauchery will fuel a hasty reassessment of their opposition – a team that, despite its feverish early billing, ended this game a disjointed and disenchanted mob. But good teams don’t disintegrate in a vacuum. It was not of his own free will that Atalanta lost the ability to chain two passes together. Instead, they were pushed and chased, pushed out of their game by perhaps the best opposition they have ever faced.
It is famous that Gian Piero Gasperini likes his teams to face each other man-to-man: for the markers to follow their targets across the field, for the defenders to win their individual battles, for the attacking players to dribble and improvise.
We now see how this suited a Liverpool team that has long been used to doing the same thing, that is well used to playing against a back three, that boasted superior individual talents who are trained to rotate and fit in until the point where it’s almost second. nature.
On the right flank, Trent Alexander-Arnold made Johan Mojica look like the inexperienced Champions League rookie that he was. On the left, Andy Robertson consistently outpaced Hans Hateboer by occasionally veering inward and running into the mid-open spaces. And up front, Diogo Jota spent the night gently pedaling through José Luis Palomino’s nightmares: playing with him, overtaking him, taunting him, hitting him and then stopping him and then hitting him again, just because he could.
Naturally, it was Jota’s hat-trick that caught the eye, a wonderful but curiously delicate thing, three goals that seemed to come almost out of nowhere, evoked only by his imagination. Above all, many of Jota’s recent goals convey this sense of pure economy, of exactly the right run and exactly the right touch and exactly the right finish with the exact pace of the right weight, and not an iota of waste in the game. process.
Genius? Or just an outstanding streak, a player totally in tune with the game and his game? Only time will tell. But what we can say for now is that Jota offers what Roberto Firmino has lacked so many times in recent weeks: the pace, the sharpness, the alertness and the confidence to lurk on the shoulder of the last man and offer a pass option.
One of the reasons Liverpool have occasionally been so heavy on offense as of late is Firmino’s tendency to fall short and play simple passes, which generally means Mohamed Salah or Sadio Mané come up for support. Conversely, when Jota passed Palomino to score his first goal, Salah was close to the right touchline, Mané deflected to the left, stretching Atalanta open like mozzarella on a pizza. Firmino remains a supreme offensive talent and an invaluable asset. But a brief period on the sidelines to recharge his game might not be the worst thing for him right now.
But this game was more than Jota. Curtis Jones had received some criticism after the 2-1 win against West Ham for playing too many single passes. Well, how about a first-time pass from deep in your own penalty area, curving 50 yards directly into Salah’s path for his first assist in the Champions League? Jones was excellent in Liverpool’s center midfield, as was Rhys Williams in center defense, albeit with little attention being demanded of him. Neco Williams came on as a late substitute and immediately produced a vital punt. All three are still 19 years old.
Great teams rebuild from a position of strength. They experiment, they strive and find new angles, new shapes, new mysteries. That, perhaps, will be the next challenge for Atalanta, who will surely learn lessons from this coup.
For Liverpool, meanwhile, this felt like more than a triumph. Winning 5-0 with the old gang – yeah, this would have been nice too. But as Jones purred in midfield and Jota rampaged up front, it felt like the first real look at what the next Liverpool would look like.
