Forest cut Reds down to size
Liverpool 0 Nottingham Forest 1, 14th September 2024
LIVERPOOL 0
NOTTINGHAM FOREST 1 (Hudson-Odoi 72)
In the words of Guardian columnist Eric Todd, Nottingham Forest’s 2–0 victory at Anfield on 15th February 1969 was a “great triumph” and “no fluke” and today, 55 years on, those very words could be justly applied again too. 42,359 were present at Anfield on that February day of over five decades past to bear witness to early goals in each half from Forest’s Barry Lyons that defeated Bill Shankly’s “first great team” of Lawrence, Lawler and Strong, Smith, Hughes and Callaghan, Hunt, Evans, St John and Thompson and albeit mere months away from being dismantled ahead of the great man’s second great team, skippered by the irrepressible Ron “Rowdy” Yeats so wonderfully respected today by a Kop mosaic in honour of the Scotman’s service in a red shirt and his sad passing last week at the age of 86.
60,344 were present in the Anfield sunshine today and Liverpool were rather “found out” in the quirky vernacular of the sport, stifled in their attacking play, bullied out of if not possession of the ball certainly a rhythm in their game, and I’d wager Forest manager Nuno Espírito Santo had this particular tactic at the top of a very long list, and his players, led magnificently by their captain and “Man of the Match” Ryan Yates, carried out his tactical game plan to perfection. Yates was everywhere in the opening minutes of the game and if not clattering into Alexis Mac Allister or Dominik Szoboszlai he was stopping and starting a dire, boring game with another player in red and was as predominant in the first 45 minutes of play as was referee Michael Oliver, forever whistling for yet another foul in an often niggly, borderline ill tempered first half of football to be forgotten very, very quickly. Unless you’re Nottingham Forest and halfway towards your first victory at Anfield in 55 years.
The dreaded statisticians will have you believing your lying eyes with the Reds officially having 14 shots off target, 5 on target, and dominating every category from possession (69%/31%), twice as many successful passes and, as the first half will aptly testify to, 15 fouls to Forest’s lowly 6. But they were bullied out of their stride for 30 minutes, had a 6 or 7 minute spell of wave after wave of pressure as the half-time whistle approached, and only Mo Salah truly tested visiting goalkeeper Matz Sels in keeping an Anfield clean sheet with two near post efforts on 51 and 76 minutes. Aside from this, the Egyptian King had a stinker today, Diogo Jota too, and whilst Ryan Gravenberch mopped up any loose balls even approaching dangerous in front of his back four Alexis Mac Allister and Dominik Szoboszlai were played out of any attacking influence on the game by visiting skipper Ryan Yates.
The Reds simply didn’t get going in the game, arguably at all.
Meanwhile their visitors kept the game tight and stop/start until the attacking introduction of substitutes Callum Hudson-Odoi and Anthony Elanga and Nuno Espírito Santo released his team to exploit the growing spaces in the middle third of the pitch. Their goal was a peach, albeit breaking my supporting heart as I knew there and then the Reds weren’t going to equalise. It was that poor of a performance. Although a gem of a goal, it resulted from a Liverpool attacking corner and the winning of a loose ball by skipper Ryan Yates on the edge of his own penalty area, a surging run and brilliant curling cross field pass from Anthony Elanga, and an incisive run and long range shot from match winner Callum Hudson-Odoi that left Reds goalkeeper Alisson Becker flat footed and helpless as he watched the ball flick off his far post before nestling in the corner of his net.
Liverpool now travel to Milan for their first engagement in this season’s all changed and all singing and all dancing Champions League. I see their away games in football fans the world over wet dream of a competition as easier and more winnable than their home encounters under the Anfield floodlights amid European stories yet to be told. Time will tell.
It always does.
I just didn’t expect their reintroduction to the elite of European football to be on the back of a home defeat to Nottingham Forest.
Forza “The Unbearables”.
Arne’s Afterword
“I think the only thing we had influence on was ball possession because they played a lot of long balls, so if you then take the ball back you need to go past 11 players. We had a lot of ball possession but only managed to create three or four quite good chances, so that is by far not enough if you have so much ball possession. If you play so much in their half, we need to do much better. We lost the ball so many times in simple situations. That is, I think, the main story from the game: ball possession not good enough”.
“If you look at the goals we have scored until now, we also scored quite a few from transition moments, from winning the ball back and then going to transition. But the other team played over our press a lot with a lot of long balls, so like I said, we got the ball mostly in our last line. Then it wasn’t good enough today because also too many individual performances in ball possession were not of the standards that I am used to from these players”.
“They have to recover in the best possible way after a win and after a loss or a draw. And we will try to in the best possible way be prepared for Tuesday, which is going to be a completely different game but also a game where we will face a lot of quality”.
Thanks for reading. I pen my thoughts on each and every Liverpool game as aptly demonstrated by these two books of which I’m immensely proud. Go on, treat yourself! Or drop some heavy hints to family and friends that these books simply must be wrapped up and beneath your tree this Christmas.
"A final word from The Boss" - link to Amazon
"Chasing the Impossible and a Sword of Damocles" - link to Amazon
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.