Neil Atkinson’s post-match review for The Anfield Wrap after Liverpool 4 Villarreal 3 in the 2026-2027 Champions League at Anfield…
In the end Liverpool deserve to win the game. It’s important to say that. Because when Alexis Mac Allister’s header hits the back of the net to make it 1-2, it is one of the all-time great undeserved Liverpool goals.
I’ve seen Liverpool get what they don’t deserve for years. But this was something else. It was floodlit robbery. Liverpool may as well have had striped shirts on and sacks with “swag”. It was a heist. Ocean’s Fourteen.
First twenty they were a rabble. An absolute rabble. Coming out, Phil Blundell told me that was an insult to rabbles. Rabble is one of those words I only ever use to describe football teams; wretched, wretched football teams.
Everything seemed a surprise. They didn’t even seem to organise themselves that well for the team photo and it only got worse from there.
The shape in and out of possession wasn’t right. Villarreal turned up with a series of traps and Liverpool stepped into all of them.
You have to presume the manager didn’t send them out to be a rabble. What they reminded me of is an extreme version of sides we’ve seen down the years on a weekend after a difficult European away. Starting slow, needing the wake up call, pulling themselves together. Which begs the question, why shouldn’t we see that the other way around?
Currently Premier League football is rock hard and draining. Does it get more draining than Brentford Saturday after an away Wednesday? Well maybe it will if it isn’t LASK and then Brentford playing a half with ten but regardless Liverpool left it all out there on Saturday and because of that got their reward.
And then this is just a bit after the Lord Mayor’s show. Something else I only ever say about football. Who has been to a Lord Mayor’s show?
Let’s park that and get back to the fact that it has always, within living memory, always been the other way round. You get up for games at Europe’s top table and manage the league games but if the manager’s selection suggested the opposite, the Liverpool team’s performance confirmed it.
For the first twenty minutes, Rio Ngumoha aside, they were lackadaisical, one-paced, brainless, shorn of everything that defined the Brentford performance from a positive perspective. Ngumoha does really well, the rest don’t and then, at least, Mac Allister woke up, switched on and began to get a grip of the game. It was this which led to the comeback.
An issue was what was at the top of the pitch. Ryan Gravenberch is not a second striker or a ten. And Lewis Koumas is probably not a centre-forward. You can mask one of these deficiencies. But not both and both were brutally exposed. Something I like about this manager and this team in this moment is:
So what? Both play their part in a Liverpool win. Both should go to bed with smiles on their face.
Because they do play their part. The manager makes his half-time change and both find ways to make their performances flower, second-half.
Very little of this makes sense but the nature of the game demands the unlikely. Gravenberch suited the right-back role because the right-back kept getting dragged into centre-mid. Koumas was helped massively by Florian Wirtz coming on because he helped link midfield and attack. Ronald Araujo had frustrated but then his last act was to score the equaliser.
And when the Reds win, we all win.
Matters went from there and for thirty five minutes the second-half was a blast. Ngumoha was magnificent, tempting and teasing his fullback, doing Spanish heads’ in and putting smiles on faces. Mac Allister drove the side on while Trey Nyoni set the tempo. Everything Wirtz did was bright and suddenly the game had gallons of Cody Gakpo all over it.
Liverpool were inevitable in the best possible way which was some journey from where matters had been only thirty minutes of play earlier. It was a clattering force. Suddenly Liverpool could only find space. Suddenly Villarreal were chasing shadows. The game had just done a 180 and Liverpool put them to the sword.
The third goal is just there to be adored. Liverpool’s best two players combining to thunder the ball home off the underside of the crossbar, leaving defenders in their wake.
Mac Allister’s resurgence appears to be as much an act of will, of focus, of structure as it is anything else. He is the most reborn since the change of manager and he is able to put games in the palm of his hand.
Ngumoha stirs the soul though. He deserved a goal but Florian Wirtz got what would become the decider. Wirtz though has deserved a goal for the last three games. He showed and grafted again and tonight is key to Liverpool suddenly making sense. Liverpool were first to everything for thirty minutes and Kostas Tsimikas – who was anything but first-half – makes the Wirtz goal with anticipation.
We currently are a side capable of anything and I mean that in all the directions. But, crucially, we are a likeable crew and we have found a gnarliness which bodes well. We look a difficult proposition and one which is in the process of getting ever more difficult.
The manager gets to manage, gets to make his choices and gets to be judged in the kernel of results and since the Manchester City oddness he is 3 wins from 3 and been able to get some rest into his players through all of that. He has never had to do this before, this is his first rodeo and while he is picking some especially wild horses, he is yet to be knocked off.
He really reminds me of Benitez, albeit with a charm with great appeal to the south of England. He’ll gladly clamber on the ragged edge and back his boys and his problem solving.
It could well be a season on the brink but those ones are so often endearing, get the blood pumping, renew a sense of mission. Liverpool are today as bad as I can remember them for twenty minutes but they are home and hosed in the winner’s enclosure and I cheered them delightedly all the way down the home straight. Anfield had a ball tonight. And, to a certain extent, that is a point. Smiles on faces. Smiles on Merseyside faces. Everything else is fluff.
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