Liverpool football club, a team which has it all (well upfront at least), with two of Brazil’s best players in Firminho and Coutinho as well as Africa’s best player Sadio Mane, and of course the English duo James ‘boring’ Milner and Jordan ‘I pretend to be Gerard’ Henderson. So, you can see why to everyone’s surprise that Liverpool Football Club blew a 3-0 lead against Spain’s 5th best team Sevilla.
However, the more astute football fan could see a comeback on the cards. Cries of ‘Crystanbul’ could be heard around the stadium and a faint echo of ‘don’t let this slip’ rang out from crowd. Unfortunately, Liverpool did, well a Liverpool and let it slip. In all honesty, you could have known there was going to be a comeback when you saw bomb scares Lovren, Klavan and Moreno playing in the same defence.
Liverpool’s captain Henderson led by example with some incredible statistics. He delivered his best Paul Scholes performance with a 55% pass accuracy, he also put Claude Makelele to shame with his defensive work as well winning a grand total of zero tackles, zero aerial duels. Hendo also picked up a yellow card for his troubles after his 5th fouls.
The French man Ben Yedder made Liverpool ‘Le Miserables’ (the miserables, for you uncultured folk) after scoring twice to spearhead a Sevilla comeback and Guido Pizarro broke Scouse hearts with an emotional 93rd minute goal to complete the comeback.
What’s the first thing you do when you’ve just scored two goals which helped Sevilla to possibly their greatest ever comeback? Troll Liverpool on twitter of course. He rubbed his comeback right in Liverpudlians faces by tweeting: “Hope AC Milan watched it”. This comes as a stab in the back as well as a twist of the knife, after Ben Yedder was speculation of much interest over the summer when rumours of a move to Europe’s most elite including Liverpool and Milan.
He’s also turned down an international call up from Tunisia who will be at the World Cup next year in hope that France bring him along. Unfortunately making a comeback against Merseyside’s second-best team is a common occurrence. Just ask QPR who came back to beat Liverpool 3-2, as well as Bournemouth who took it one step further by scoring 4 goals to overcome a 3-goal deficit.
Keep it up and you may find yourself on the plane to Russia… but not as a player. You’ll have the great responsibility of making sure Martial, Mbappe, Lacazette, Griezmann and Giroud all have enough H20 in their system, an important yet overlooked role.
Those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it, and ironically for a team with so much history, Liverpool never learn.