Neil Atkinson’s post-match review for The Anfield Wrap after Sunderland 0 Liverpool 1 in the 2025-2026 Premier League at the Stadium Of Light…
Win the right to play.
Football changes all the time. Positions flit in and out of importance. Shapes are fashion. Sometimes you need a 9. Sometimes a 9 is an indulgence.
But there are truisms. Here are two:
1. Win the right to play.
2. Win your home games.
Tonight Liverpool were up against the side that had taken making 1 as hard as possible and 2 as crucial as possible to the absolute limits.
In every version of football ever winning the right to play has always mattered when you are the better side with the bigger budget.
Tonight, for the first time in what feels like forever, Liverpool won the right to play. You can lose the right to play in a load of ways, not just a physical battle, but by conceding a soft one or by being less good early or by “growing into the game” which is often just a red rag to any bull you care to mention.
Liverpool did none of that nonsense tonight and instead they won the right and rode it into the sunset. They played and played. Suddenly in the unforgiving, pouring rain Sunderland were begging for half time. They were pulled this way and that. They went from looking and sounding like a football team who were craving fresh meat to kittens who just needed Florian Wirtz to put the toy down for a bit.
They went into half time meek and mild. They came out better, sharper, with an idea but Liverpool again won the right.
Let’s be clear – Liverpool should go in 0-1. Maybe even 0-2. The next phase for this side is that sort of thing.
But let’s be clear – the first half was like taking off tight shoes. More than any other away league game this season, it was like watching the Champions. Unbeaten are you? Pouring down is it? Watch this.
Better side, Liverpool. Over and over the better side, over and over first to everything, over and over the ball comes back.
It was possibly the most meaningful 45 minutes of Florian Wirtz’s season. All the weather, all the aggression and he looks to everyone on the pitch the best player by a mile. Not just to everyone in the stand or on the telly, but to the other 21 players as the best player they have seen all year. Again – this doesn’t result in a goal and that could have ended up mattering but it is another step forward in Florian Wirtz’s steps forward.
Sunderland are good. Not great. But they live for duels and they win their battles. Well not today. Ibou Konate is winning his battles and he is winning yours too. Konate’s journey since Elland Road is a credit to himself and his manager and his captain. This doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from coaching and from being part of a collective. Tonight isn’t his best performance of the season but it is his best against a side which isn’t of European qualification quality. Which is the majority of the teams you play.
You name it and he managed it or dominated it. In this mood he is the centre back of your Liverpudlian dreams. He’s Lawrenson to Hansen. He’s Emlyn Hughes. All front foot and all faces and aggression and charisma. He’s the man you’d follow to the jaws of hell.
Alexis Mac Allister throws in his best performance of this season by a mile and his twelfth best of the last two seasons but you deal on that right now. Again, he’s all aggression, all winning the right and then all playing. The ball snaps out of him.
Across the pitch Liverpool players have decided they just won’t be second best. What’s hard in the game, for us and for them, is understanding a draw is fine in your personal battle from time to time. If 11v11 you win 5 and draw 6 then you tend to win the game. Today there is a humility from Liverpool. These are unbeaten – they will take some beating. The weather is punishing – we need to accept it can’t be perfect. The table is against us – we need to right it and it starts now.
I’m gutted I never went because tonight isn’t Liverpool’s best performance of the campaign but it is their most correct, their most serious. It is one which should offer hope and belief. If they can do this here then they can do it at the City Ground, at the Amex, at the Hill Dickinson.
Liverpool won the right to play. And then they played. Then they won. Then they fought and defended for their lives. The better side were the better side and they took the points home. They will need to play better but they won’t need to fight harder because nobody will fight like Sunderland.
It’s a big step forward and I feel top of the world you know.
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