Christmas cheer for the Reds as they top the Premier League
Burnley 0 Liverpool 2, 26th December 2023.
BURNLEY 0
LIVERPOOL 2 (Núñez 6, Jota 90)
“Liverpool. Liverpool. Top of the League.
Liverpool. Top of the League!”
Oh how I adore this old school chant! But it wasn’t always so cut and dried and as a prime example, let’s begin in the 54th minute shall we?
For 9 second half minutes, the Reds continued where they ended a first half of complete domination but with only Darwin Núñez’s beautiful 9th minute strike to show for their sweeping control of the game. The second half commenced in attack versus defence mode with Burnley happy to retreat deep in their half of the field and keep the game and score line tight for a late game assault and thus, gifting Liverpool the ball and unpressurised resistance until their visitors were in and around their penalty area. So for 9 second half minutes Liverpool swept the ball around the lush green grass of Turf Moor until some sharp interchanging passes set Ryan Gravenberch free and his first time square pass into the penalty area was met by Harvey Elliott with a sublime first time side-footed drive that left Burnley goalkeeper James Trafford flat-footed and thoroughly beaten.
The Reds of Liverpool had a deserved second goal, a sublime and footballing pleasing one too with the ball never leaving the Burnley turf, and a cushion for the remainder of the game.
Or had they?
Then VAR, that spectre of footballing death intervened to convince referee Paul Tierney to trudge off to the side of the pitch to see what his own human eyes had missed in real time, that Mo Salah was standing in an offside position, in front of goalkeeper James Trafford and hence, in the footballing vernacular, “interfering with play”. So a beautiful goal that adhered to the greatest of footballing principles by playing the “Beautiful Game” on the grass, at pace, with guile, thought, invention and with real beauty, was chalked off, deleted, never happened, and all because our dystopian “Eye in the Sky” overlords deemed it so.
Now that’s “interfering with play”.
Why am I leading with a disallowed goal that, thankfully, didn’t alter the outcome of the final score that sees the Reds top the Premier League once more?
Because VAR boils my piss. It should infuriate you too but you’re probably under the age of 30, roguishly handsome or stunningly beautiful (depending on which side of the gender divide you fall) and you’ll only know of this game under the correctly incorrect guidance of the ghouls and goblins in VAR and you’ll have been propagandised to believe that this is the future of the game rather than its slow decaying death. You’ll also be under the impression that VAR needs “modification”, “tweaking”, “improving” and other such fluff and nonsense rather than what really needs to be done with VAR:
The entire system should be encased in a mile thick of concrete and dumped in the world’s deepest ocean and treated as hazardous waste for all eternity.
As you’ll have guessed by now I’m a hardliner in this respect and we can disagree. But I’m right with my soon to be trademarked “VAR — The Death Knell of the Beautiful Game” and every week I’m proven correct.
A beautiful goal was simply deleted.
We were all told to disbelieve our lying eyes.
The immediacy, joy, spontaneity and thrill of a goal killed STONE DEAD.
And we all stared at our shoes in utter boredom.
And it’s going to get worse. A lot, lot worse.
VAR is due to be implemented for more and more on-field decisions, grinding the great game to a stone dead stop more and more and eventually, when this becomes ever more unwieldy and contentious, the game will follow the pattern of the NFL by introducing a “challenge flag” for the managers to dispute on-field decisions as a way of placating the surreal utter madness unfolding on the field of play.
I give it 5 years until its implementation, by which time I’ll hopefully have made my millions writing and be sat on a beach in the Caribbean, watching the waves crash gently upon the shore.
“VAR — The Death Knell of the Beautiful Game”.
My self-published book on Liverpool FC - Available via Amazon
Whilst the abomination that is VAR didn’t change the result or the destiny of the valued 3 Premier League points, it certainly changed the mindset of a placid Burnley team as well as the Turf Moor faithful who finally found their voices to roar on their favourites in claret and blue. Whereas the Reds created a glut of goal scoring chances in the first half, these were severely absent in the second as Burnley threatened an undeserved equaliser and through substitutes Jóhann Berg Guðmundsson (a free header from close range on 67 minutes) and Jacob Bruun Larsen (inches wide on 87 minutes after the only mistake of the game from an otherwise faultless Wataru Endō) they came close. But justice prevailed as the aforementioned Wataru Endō won a contested ball on the halfway line, eventual goalscorer Diogo Jota swapped passes with fellow substitute Luis Díaz before scoring between the legs of goalkeeper James Trafford from an acute angle at his near post.
So the Reds of Liverpool are top of the Premier League tree this Christmas and will remain there should Arsenal fail to win any of their upcoming London derbies with West Ham United and Fulham as the Premier League ends the calendar year in a flurry of games in the coming week.
Not bad for a team in transition and evolution with a makeshift midfield, strikers that apparently can’t score goals, injuries galore and yet the children of the social media age demand more! Yes more from a team that is being evolved for a future by a manager with one hand seemingly tied behind his back yet time and again and that very same man from Stuttgart with the most wondrous of beards smiles his way through the critics of his “boys”, the boys he moulds into footballing men and into teams he demands play energetic, exciting and winning football that is rewarded with season ending trophies.
“Liverpool. Liverpool. Top of the League.
Liverpool. Top of the League!”
A final word from The Boss
“You never know exactly what you can expect with the fourth game in 10 days, it was really intense. Whatever the outside world thinks, it is really intense — and coming here and playing the game we played is absolutely exceptional. It’s exceptional as well that we didn’t score more goals… actually, we did but for different reasons they took them away. So, we had to wait long and obviously for a long time we caused Burnley so many problems, we played a super game”.
“I really liked the game we played, but we should have scored more and that’s clear. Then the game stays open and Burnley have massive chances to score at the second post — maybe even the first they had, if I am right: the finish when he mishits the ball. I am pretty sure that was the first chance for them, but in the end we deserved to win the game and it was two perfect goalscorers, I would say, with Darwin and then Diogo”.
“We sneaked him in somehow on the squad list because he trained only twice and the medical department wanted to give him extra training and I said he can have that in Burnley. He had that tonight and now he can train tomorrow properly and then he will be ready for Newcastle, which is really helpful. Two-nil, no injuries, all good”.
Thanks for reading. Go on, sneak another look at that rather fine self-published book available on Amazon linked in the middle of this article! It’s Christmas! And guess what? It’s only 364 days until it’s Christmas again, so get your Christmas shopping in early!