Neil Atkinson’s post-match review for The Anfield Wrap after Nottingham Forest 0 Liverpool 1 in the 2025-2026 Premier League at the City Ground…
All hell broke loose. Not in the way you are used to. But Liverpool got three last minute winners. One taken away. One in and then a realisation it may not be. Then there it was. There it was. Liverpool win the game. Resplendent. Forest broken.
Daylight robbery. Unbelievable. Never deserved in a million years.
And that was my reaction to it being 0-0 at half-time.
Liverpool were genuinely atrocious, first-half. Take the centre-backs and the goalkeeper out of the equation and every other Liverpool player gets in at the break having utterly let the side down. Let themselves down.
By the end it is a little bit different, a little bit more 50/50, a teeny bit in Liverpool’s favour. Second-half Liverpool showed tons of courage, a teeny bit of quality and then forced the issue in their box twice really well.
They made all hell break loose.
It wasn’t the usual kind of all hell. It wasn’t in the normal grammar of football miracles (on a weekly basis, season after season) but it was instead even more miraculous. Liverpool hadn’t battered at the door but they had hung in and hung in and they got their reward.
It’s hard to describe how marvellous it felt the first time you thought the game had been stolen. By the time we get to the third we’re left covered in mud but that makes it all the sweeter.
The first-half is the ultimate video for the players and the coaching staff. Liverpool lose Florian Wirtz before a ball has been kicked but they couldn’t have looked worse, been further away from winning their battles had he been sent-off after one minute. Florian Wirtz will save football but it cannot be that Liverpool cannot play without him.
Curtis Jones’s first ten is as though he’d been pulled in from the dark to play. But Jones isn’t alone – Liverpool collapse like a house of cards. Is this the manager? Is this the players? The latter can’t complete three passes, can’t control the ball, aren’t aggressive, won’t get out.
But the shape. Good lord, the shape is dreadful and it feels like Forest and their canny manager have seen it coming. Elliot Anderson has so, so much time. Liverpool look like they have been to Turkey. Liverpool look like they have eaten turkey. Liverpool look like fucking turkeys and they get away with murder.
Because both centre-backs are great. It is easy to be Virgil van Dijk when Thiago, Fabinho and Jordan Henderson are purring. But Virgil van Dijk today is the best version of himself while the clown car in front of him has wheels spinning away.
Ibou Konate has been the best version of himself for a couple of months now but while those in front of him feel sorry for themselves he fights for everything. He shifts it well, passes as well as any Liverpool player and while that isn’t necessarily a compliment given that Liverpool must have about an 8% pass completion first-half, he is again outstanding.
These two lads deserve everything today. For them it isn’t swag. They show bollocks throughout and your correspondent rarely uses that sort of language because it should sort of go without saying but not today.
The manager has a great half-time. He takes that first-half – which is Liverpool’s worst performance in a half of football since the second-half of Brighton away in January 2023 and makes them alright. Why a great half-time? Because the worst half of football before that second-half against Brighton in 2023 was the first-half of the same game. Liverpool improve from absolute abject rubbish, and that day in January 2023 Jürgen Klopp couldn’t bring that about.
It still isn’t good enough – Liverpool are wasting too much time in too many matches early, not being the side they need to be. But it is something – last season the gaffer was great at half-time and today he outdoes his opposite number.
Then though, the subs. Rio Ngumoha and Joe Gomez are both marvellous when they come on. Both deserve more opportunities but we need to be grown up and acknowledge it is difficult for the manager around both, albeit for different reasons. That said either are on the teamsheet against West Ham and I am going to be delighted.
The very best thing about the game – and it is a bloody stupid game at heart – is that it either offers constant redemption or offers constant reminders that you are a gobshite. Alexis Mac Allister was so poor for so long in the match but he genuinely persisted. He fought for a foothold and went from there.
But what he always tries to be is whatever a moment requires and on two occasions he played centre-forward much more so than his more vaunted attacking colleagues. Once he nearly got his reward. The second time the reward was all his apart from what he had to share with the travelling contingent who got to give the biggest of big ones to a set of supporters who have made despising the best city in the country central to their essence.
Fuck them because this is the eternal truth of the game. Fuck the idea that it has to make sense. Fuck getting what you deserve and fuck logic. All hell broke loose. It was marvellous and bloody stupid. It was ultimately comedic. It was about hanging in for dear life and it is about what centre-backs give you.
Another crazy win.
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