Leashed, but Only Just
On the face of it, with Liverpool second and Wolves last coming into this match, to a casual observer this might have looked an easy one for Reds. Not so. Wolves drew the hardest opening schedule to the season (arguably by a decent stretch), have played pretty good football so far, and are somewhat unlucky to have only one point to show for it. This will bring them rewards soon enough.
It almost brought them a reward today.
I’m not talking about the freak equalizer, off an absolutely awful blunder by Konate, capitalized on by Wolves’ best performer of the night, Ait-Nouri. The Red’s Frenchman was so rattled by his silly error that he proceeded to make a couple more in quick succession and collected a yellow before he collected himself and returned to something resembling reasonable form. It was unfortunate since to up until that point, he was terrific, staking a potential claim on being man-of-the-match. His goal at the death of the first half from a delicious Jota cross (with faint echoes of Gini’s second goal vs. Barca in that famous 4-0) capped an otherwise wonderful display.
Jota was there to win a penalty not a minute later, which Salah easily converted. It’s always nice to bag a winner, but Salah was otherwise well below average (I’m being nice), and his loose passing actively destroyed a couple of very promising counters. Let’s hope he gets back to form before the back-to-back Chelsea and Arsenal games looming right around the corner.
Ryan Gravenberch had another excellent game, as did Macca. The two have developed an inspiring partnership in the midfield, and I suspect that it would have more fruitful today had it not been for the clear winner of the trash pile award, one Dominik Szoboszlai. In several stretches, he looked so lost that Liverpool may well have been playing with ten, but because he was wearing a red-colored shirt, his mere presence created openings that Wolves, thankfully, failed to exploit. Curtis Jones did much better after he came on, and deserves a shot at being in the starting lineup instead of the Hungarian.
Outside of a completely unnecessary, stupid yellow for kicking the ball away on the sixth minute, Trent continues to develop under Slot, and it showed both defensively (where his awareness is improving) and offensively (where is awareness is approaching godlike levels). So before I tell you who does win my man-of-the-match – alright, fine, that would be Robbo, who was outstanding, hopefully did not pick up an injury from a vicious tackle by Forbs, and was replaced by Gomez as a cautionary measure – let me express the sentiment I believe most of you share:
FSG, get off your effing bums and renew his contract already!
There, got that off my chest.
Nice to be top of the league again. Let’s try to keep it this time, hmm?
