Neil Atkinson’s post-match review for The Anfield Wrap after Liverpool 2 Atletico Madrid 1 in the 2026-2027 Champions League at Anfield…
Christ you liked them. You liked Liverpool so much.
Atletico Madrid could be Liverpool’s perfect opponent in many ways. Good but not great. Horrible but in a European way which brings the best out of Anfield rather than the tetchy. Well organised but can be overwhelmed.
It was blood and bone football without ever quite becoming unbearably bloody or bony and every man jack of them, all sixteen who featured across the course of the game, threw themselves in with gusto.
Liverpool came from behind to win the game for the first time since last October. Liverpool scrapped for everything at every step and Liverpool backed each other up as well.
So much of last season was so bloodless that something like The Hill Dickinson came as a massive surprise. Right now, you can imagine any Liverpool game ascending into two, five or ten minutes of pitched battle.
The equalising goal when it comes has a rugby league feel to it. Bodies surging vertically everywhere, cascades of red. Milos Kerkez, Alexander Isak, Florian Wirtz. Bradley Barcola, Alexis Mac Allister, Ronald Araujo. Finally Araujo works it horizontally to Szoboszlai and he finishes. The goal isn’t as much well worked as well forced. If you supported Atletico Madrid you’d be furious and you’d wonder what had happened.
Two things:
- Every Liverpool player seizes the moment and sees it is there. Araujo the most. Him being a centre-back not a right-back contributes to the goal Liverpool concede, but him being game as fuck leads to the assist. He fancies it and grabs it and won’t let it go.
- Sheer pace. That may not matter in the final reckoning but the reason Atletico are in disarray is Liverpool’s pace.
It is that pace which creates the same circumstances for the second. Mac Allister could be the slowest Liverpool player on the pitch but he benefits because Atletico are bemused and scared to death. Last season we were so often one-paced that the opposition could get themselves straight and organised. Diego Simeone’s Atletico Madrid should be good at that but their head’s spinning, left in a daze.
At the other end of the pitch Jeremy Jacquet was outrageously good for a man who was making his Champions League debut. He won his battles over and over and while Liverpool were a long way from perfect they never felt vulnerable at 2-1.
Flipping the experience scale, Mac Allister had another excellent hour. He won the game played on both his and their terms and showed the rawest determination. You liked him. He’s a man who showed his vulnerability yesterday and showed his courage today. A lot of last season he, like so many others, stopped being likeable. It was a collective problem, an individual problem, a structural problem. It bounced back and forth and hither between all three and bounced faster. Liverpool did your head in and the pressure of that built and there was so rarely a release valve.
It wasn’t perfect, far from it. But that’s sort of the appeal – right now we know it can’t be, so do all the mucky stuff with all our hearts. The spacing was poor at times, different areas in both halves, the subs struggled to get to the pace of it, the new £110m signing should have scored, but all that doesn’t matter because this felt like a collective step. Their eleven vs our eleven and our eleven has all of us on their side. Because that is the way it should be but also because, Christ, we like them.
Steve Graves once said that his favourite Liverpool player was the eleven who wear red. Today it was the sixteen, but yes. That.
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