Reds canter 13 points clear in the Premier League
Liverpool 2 Newcastle United 0, 26th February 2025
LIVERPOOL 2 (Szoboszlai 11, Mac Allister 63)
NEWCASTLE UNITED 0
Last evening’s 2–0 victory over a limp Newcastle United missing their talismanic and free scoring striker Alexander Isak was as easy, comfortable and dominant as expected of a team topping the Premier League, and with Arsenal only drawing 0–0 away at Nottingham Forest, by a gargantuan 13 points. In truth, it wasn’t much of a game in all honesty and the result never in doubt following Dominik Szoboszlai’s 11th minute strike allowed the Reds the freedom to play some sharp and incisive football from back to front throughout an impressive first half of complete domination and when struggling to raise their game to such exalted levels in the second half and Newcastle finally having the ball in the Reds half and exerting some semblance of pressure, Alexis Mac Allister nicked a stray pass from Newcastle’s Sandro Tonali just inside his own half, carried it to the edge of the visitors penalty area before exchanging passes with Mo Salah and curling a beauty into the top corner of The Kop End net.
2–0. Game over. Let the songs of celebration and repeated refrains of “We’re Gonna Win The League” commence.
7 evenings ago following the Reds 2–2 draw with Aston Villa they faced the prospect of 2 games that could arguably make or break or at least go some way to defining their season. 7 evenings later, Arne Slot’s Liverpool have beaten Manchester City and Newcastle United by 4 clear goals without conceding and with the minimum of fuss. Alisson Becker’s 94th Premier League clean sheet was never in doubt as without Newcastle registering a single shot on his goal I was confident enough to state on Twitter at half-time that the only reason he’d dirtied his goalkeeping gloves was to remove them mid-game to light a cigar! The defence in front of him, marshalled magnificently as always by skipper Virgil van Dijk, was defeated just once all evening by a run from Callum Wilson who eventually screwed his shot badly wide on half an hour. Aside from this, it was plain sailing for Kostas Tsimikas in for a rested Andy Robertson, Ibrahima Konaté seems to grow an inch taller and a yard quicker with every game played beside van Dijk and Trent Alexander-Arnold had a ball, spraying passes quarterback style the length and breadth of this field on Anfield Road. Dominik Szoboszlai scored again, impressed again, and was once again every right thinking football fan’s “Man of the Match”, just pipping the Colombian magician Luis Díaz. Mo Salah didn’t score and will have to wait another game for another goal to become the Reds 3rd all-time top goal scorer, an honour he currently shares with South African Gordon Hodgson dating back to 1935. But he tallied another assist for Alexis Mac Allister’s goal and his history making goal will come soon enough.
And from a purely selfish point of view, my favourite player of recent times Wataru Endō came on as a second half substitute, made a couple of crunching, ball winning challenges in midfield, giving rise to some of the loudest cheers of the evening.
Oh Wataru! Be still my beating heart.
All in all, it was another perfect Premier League evening for Arne Slot’s Mighty Reds.
Arne’s Afterword
“What impressed me most was that this was our fifth game in 15 days and the four before weren’t the most simple ones. So, Everton we all know how an emotional game that was for both teams but definitely for us as well and then Wolves and then two difficult away games with Villa and City. To show up the way we did tonight, hardly conceding a chance against a very good team like Newcastle, is a big compliment for the players how they handled these five games in 15 days”.
“I’ve explained it already a few times that that’s the biggest reason why I didn’t take these players to Plymouth Argyle because then they have to travel again, they are away from home, they might have to play 10, 15, 30, 45 minutes because I would definitely have used them if I would have taken them — and that means for them no rest. That’s why I didn’t take them to PSV Eindhoven as well because I believe in the fact that these players are able to play five games in 15 days like they show. But they can’t do this for 10 months in a row, so they need to have, once in a while, a break. We are talking about a break if I’m talking about five, six days of not playing a game of football”.
Thanks for reading. I pen my thoughts on every Liverpool game and in recent seasons, with the addition of numerous pieces of retro writing on Reds games of the past, I’ve curated and created the following two self-published books:
"A final word from The Boss" - link to Amazon
"Chasing the Impossible and a Sword of Damocles" - link to Amazon
Whilst you’re here I may as well brag about the release of my trilogy of recently self-published books too. Beautiful covers eh! As the title(s) would suggest, this is my life at the movies or at least from 1980 to 2024, and in volume 1 you’ll find 80 spoiler free appraisals of movies from debut filmmakers, 91 of the very best films appraised with love and absent of spoilers from 1990–2024 in volume 2, and in volume 3 you’ll find career “specials” on Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino together with the very best of the rest and another 87 spoiler free film reviews from 2001–2024.
All available in hardback and paperback and here are some handy links:
"A Life at the Movies Vol.1" - link to Amazon
"A Life at the Movies Vol.2" - link to Amazon
"A Life at the Movies Vol.3" - link to Amazon