Neil Atkinson’s post-match review for The Anfield Wrap after Liverpool 1 Brentford 1 in the 2025-2026 Premier League at Anfield…
I’m glad it is over. But they’ve well and truly burnt my head out this season and today was no exception
Liverpool were dreadful from 1-0 until the end of the game. Before then we were good against a good side and on balance deserved their lead. They were good to watch. They were focused and had a sense of what they were about despite not having a centre forward. Cody Gakpo did alright and did brilliantly for the goal. Liverpool didn’t fit well together but they fought for each other and backed each other up.
By the end they deserve to get beat.
It’s easy to say it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. But Liverpool have been atrocious at 1-0 too often this season. All the patterns were the same. Alisson Becker and Virgil van Dijk didn’t look too happy about it.
The attacking options that come off the bench are limited meaning that yet again a right back ends the game right wing. Curtis Jones is again the highpoint and is also not a right back. But he is doing a good impression of one and deserved his goal.
Across the board until 1-0 they are alright. Dominik Szoboszlai has his best game in that most advanced midfield position for a while. Ryan Gravenberch has his best performance in the deepest lying one too.
It isn’t without its problems. Rio Ngumoha looks a teenager playing his position and learning it in and out of possession and that is fine. What isn’t fine is thinking Liverpool may think there is the chance of him being a genuine squad option next season. He should be Liverpool’s sixth best attacking option at best and that isn’t including Hugo Ekitike who is best thought of as a 2027/28 move.
In the end it doesn’t matter and I don’t know how I feel about that. Should they play devil may care? Should they shut down? Yet again they do neither. Instead 1-0 to full time is infuriating and it shouldn’t be. It should just be “well end of season” but you are watching them be poor as a game draws to a close again.
I think Liverpool have broken me. For the first time in my life I feel utterly cumudgeonly. I’m not that guy. I love going the match. People ask me, say to me “does the work not make it hard?” and my response is that seeing them on the grass is the best thing. The time when there is nothing to worry about or think about or focus on than one simple thing – what happens on the pitch.
I love Liverpool winning and I love watching Liverpool on and off the pitch strain every sinew to win and I’m alright with not winning; you are going to get beat. This is the world and you can’t do my job if you are a bad loser. You are going to lose and then talk into a camera and write it down. That is true of really good Liverpool teams, of bad Liverpool teams. Of whatever this is. But whatever this is has been bloodless for far, far too many occasions this season.
So whatever this is is a problem. I’d err on the side of moving the manager on as said previously with an enormous amount of love and respect but for me that is a second order problem at most. Liverpool not having enough good players is the key problem. Liverpool not looking fit and ready is the key problem. This is a year where there are a great many reasons why that might be the case and the greatest one of all is the sort of tragedy that rattles a football club to its core.
Part of that core left rattling though is left wondering if there is actually the stomach to solve the problems – to show that every little thing will actually be alright with actions. Given that all contracts expire in less than sixty weeks and given the sheer lack of public acknowledgement of the shortcomings who is to say?
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All of this brings us to the two departures. There may, by the way, be more. Every summer leads to rumours around Joe Gomez. This summer has rumours around Alisson Becker. I can’t see it, especially for the goalkeeper, but I’ve been wrong before. Other players, league winning players, will leave and ought to. Refresh/reset however you may term it requires a degree of churn.
Not all departures from football clubs need the pomp and palaver.
But today’s two did.
They leave as Liverpool greats. Genuine contenders for all time elevens. Every medal you can ask to have in their bags as they sling them over the shoulder.
More than all that though – they shared the journey with us and they understood it is in it all being together, a collective journey, that it is special. Mo Salah plays his best football for Liverpool when the supporters come back into stadia after the pandemic. He wanted to show us how special it can be. He played his most impactful football for us when the leadership of the football club came down to him and the captain. It was then football’s eternal question of who carries who came into play. Liverpool carried Salah into a position where he could win Liverpool the league. Salah carried Liverpool to the league. Perfect.
Robertson embodied the moment when Liverpool were the only club in the country not to step aside for Manchester’s monied juggernaut but instead to choose to run right at them. Running in their faces and he announced both himself and us that day and he never stopped. It never stopped. We never stopped. Like him we weren’t perfect as you may find in a textbook, but like him we were the best in the world for a few years there.
Both are amongst the greatest living Liverpudlians. Identity isn’t just what you start with. Identity is not fixed at birth. Identity is what you opt in to, what values you take, and whose on whose journey you choose to walk. Identity is not one immutable thing. The forces of ill try to reduce us all to less than we are. The bad in this world comes from that reduction, treating people as things to quote Pratchett; as fixed marks. A richer, more glorious identity comes from the journey in life, the work, walking the road.
Robertson and Salah have both committed themselves wholeheartedly, with the blood and the bone, to being of this thing of ours and have given everything they have to offer to make it work as well as it can. That hasn’t meant it has been endlessly rosy – far from it. The most telling Salah image of my mind remains him in tears holding the top goalscorer and top assist trophy in 2022 because Liverpool hadn’t been fortunate enough to win the league when they had been good enough to do it.
When I think of this season foreshadowed by tragedy I think of Robertson screaming at a referee in pre-season, clearly struggling with the loss and the burden. Because if you do give everything, if you offer the blood and the bone, it comes at a cost. Everything does. Even triumph.
Triumph though, all that triumph tumbling down. The 19/20 team did the cliche of treating every game as a cup final and therefore won more cup finals than any team I have ever seen because it was the only way they felt they could do it. Robertson bending it round for Salah to nod home against the only real sporting rivals being the Mount Everest of goals at Anfield, quite possibly the greatest ever when quality meets moment meets yearning.
That’s what they met – yearning. They answered the call and realised that the place to be themselves, the best version of themselves was here with us.
They realised that working for others, sacrificing everything to the collective journey, every day, as hard as you can, to the best of your ability, breathing the soul of it and extolling the virtues of it in every word and every deed are the only way to do it.
A Liver Bird upon their chests. Forever.
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