From the archive: A late winner, "Mr. Tierney," and a pulled hamstring.
Liverpool 4-3 Tottenham.
Anfield, Massachusetts is back! After a month of hard work on other things, this blog will resurrect itself for the very silly season it has already criticized. New post soon, but until then, here is something that never quite made it to air: a review of Liverpool’s 4-3 win over Tottenham Hotspur on April 30. Let’s go together back to those halcyon days, when Champions League was still possible, albeit far away, and when we hadn’t yet signed our new Argentinian star Alexis Mac Allister.
[Editor’s note: this review was written during the Relegation Cup Final between Leicester City and Everton. The close reader will notice that mentions of that match are scattered throughout.]
Too much happened yesterday in the game between Liverpool and Tottenham. I don’t mean that too much happened to recap here, though this is true: I mean that too many things happened for one football match. Ninety minutes of sports aren’t supposed to create twelve or thirteen distinct storylines. I will faithfully recap three of the major ones here, as always, but writing this gives me a sense of uneasy half-completion.
I: And his name is Diogo!
Two weeks ago, I said that Diogo Jota was back. One week ago, I said that he continued to be back. This week, Jota managed to be somehow back-er, winning the game for Liverpool 4-3 in a stoppage-time thriller. This was no close match: the first fifteen minutes featured the best Liverpool play all year, by a wide margin. The reds were, as the poet wrote, “playing out of their minds.” And it did seem a performance devoid of anxiety or even confidence—passes and shots seemed to come from some deep place of instinct. It was beautiful football.
Then Liverpool spent the next 75 minutes trying to throw it all away—not defending, giving the ball away too easily, and generally quaking in their boots. Spurs scored twice, in minutes 40 and 77, and hit the post twice more. Heung-min Son was on fire—physically, almost—and Harry Kane had dropped into a deeper, playmaking role. I was sure Liverpool would draw the match.
Then, in the second minute of stoppage time, my prediction came true—Richarlison, the former Everton forward and World Cup pigeon-celebrator,
OH MY GOD EVERTON HAVE SCORED, 1-0 AT THE KING POWER
scored one of the strangest headers I’ve ever seen. Spurs fully deserved the draw, if not the win, at this point, and as I watched the ball sail over the suspended Alisson, I thought a 3-3 draw was what our season demanded. I thought we deserved, too, the humiliation of conceding Richarlison’s first-ever league goal at Spurs, and the humiliation of seeing him rip his shirt off to reveal a deeply strange back tattoo of his own face, flanked on the left by Ronaldo (Nazario) and on the right by Neymar. (Neymar doesn’t like the tattoo as much as Richarlison does, apparently, and reportedly sent him £26,000 to have it removed.)
Silence at Anfield.
Then, with only a few minutes to go now, Alisson played a long ball forward, encouraged by his defenders, who were all pointing upfield. Lucas Moura, who had come on in the 90th minute, misplayed a pass backward. Diogo Jota ran to intercept, took two calm touches, and flushed the ball into the opposite corner. 4-3 Liverpool. We might not have deserved it, but the players had belief anyhow. We won.
Jota is on the run of his life: 5 goals in his last four, all of them important—this latest one snatched from only 27 minutes played as a substitute for the newly fit Luis Díaz. These are the kinds of goals that people remember: not only fans, but managers—managers who decide which players stay and go, which players start and sit. Jota proved once again yesterday that he
LEICESTER SCORE ON A VERY WEIRD HALF-VOLLEY, COULD PICKFORD HAVE DONE BETTER THERE?
can be trusted with big moments, especially big moments where the rest of the squad aren’t playing well or giving him much help.
II: “Mr. Tierney”
Liverpool have a long, dark history with Paul Tierney, the referee who officiated yesterday’s match; last year, to name only one incident, he refereed the match between Liverpool and Spurs, failing to give Harry Kane a red card for a challenge against Andrew Robertson, but then giving Robertson a red card for an arguably tamer challenge against Spurs defender Emerson Royal.
Liverpool drew that match, and lost the title to Manchester City by one point, meaning that a win in that match would have claimed the title. To be fair,
VARDY 2-1 WHAT A CALM FINISH
I think most arguments like this are specious; City probably feel there were points taken from them by referees during that season, or else points given to Liverpool by other decisions. But the point is: Tierney made a decision that was widely criticized, in a very big moment. After the game, Klopp let loose this bit of hot-mic honesty:
Of course, officials are humans and make mistakes. But it was very strange to see Tierney picked again for this fixture, one year later, especially given the fact that he made several suspect decisions against Liverpool in a match against Wolves earlier this winter. At the time, I mentioned that he insisted on waiting for long periods before each restart—this, and a number of very strange yellow cards, combined for the kind of halting, ref-centric, heavy-handed performance that makes football difficult to watch.
DOMINIC CALVERT-LEWIN MISSES AN OPEN GOAL. IF EVERTON GO DOWN, THAT MOMENT MAY SEEM ENORMOUS
But if we are to think of officials as humans, and athletes, maybe we should praise the PGMOL, who select referees for each match, for sticking Tierney straight back on the horse of late-season Liverpool/Spurs.
To say he fell off that horse would be an understatement. Tierney made so many poor decisions that, in the end, they may have cancelled each other out. But if a referee’s job is, first and foremost, the maintenance of player safety, Tierney did a truly poor job. First, in the 34th minute, he missed an absolutely
SEAMUS COLEMAN, WITH AN ABSOLUTELY DEVASTATING LEG INJURY, RISES FROM THE STRETCHER ON HIS WAY OFF THE PITCH TO ENCOURAGE HIS TEAMMATES—LAZARUS-LIKE IN HIS WILL TO GO ON
awful challenge from Oliver Skipp on Luis Díaz. It was the kind of studs-up violence that can end a season, especially for Díaz, who has spent most of this season out with a knee injury. Skipp likely didn’t mean to be, but he was certainly out of control; it should have been called a red card on the pitch, and certainly on VAR. But it went unnoticed, apparently, even as Díaz required treatment on the pitch—as good a time as any to look at the replay.
This miss by Tierney was bookended by another horror challenge in the 81st minute, when Jota’s high boot collided with the head of—who else—Oliver Skipp. Skipp was bleeding badly, but Jota only saw yellow, even after another long break while the bleeding from Skipp’s brow was stanched, and Richarlison replaced him.
Jota’s challenge on Skipp looked worse, for certain, than Skipp’s on Díaz—and a high-res still photo of it is flying around on Twitter as ammunition for Spurs fans feeling wronged. But, according to the rules at least, it may have actually been less “dangerous”—Skipp dipped his head into Jota’s boot, as is visible on the replay, and Jota is clearly in control and unaware that Skipp is there.
OH MY GOODNESS LEICESTER PENALTY
The point here is—Skipp should never have been on the field to receive this injury; he should have been long gone after his challenge on Díaz. True, the decision to let Skipp continue didn’t cause the injury—someone else might have tried to head the ball there in Skipp’s place—but the facts as they stood yesterday highlighted Tierney’s failure
PICKFORD SAVES, MADDISON’S KICK WAS IN THE MATHEMATICAL CENTER OF THE GOAL
to control the game. I know that, if I were refereeing, I would pray that a player I’d let continue after a bad challenge didn’t later become involved in a key moment.
By the time of Jota’s winner, the refereeing had become a (if not the) major story in a game which was more than entertaining enough on its own. It was enough of a story that when the ball shot into the corner, and when Jota celebrated the win, Klopp took off down the touchline, strained his hamstring, and celebrated in the face of the fourth official—the poor guy whose job it is to mediate between managers and officials. Klopp is going to get in trouble for this celebration, not to mention the interview he gave after, where he accused “Mr. Tierney” of bias against Liverpool and insinuated that Tierney had said something out of order while giving him a yellow card for his celebration. (The PGMOL “strongly refute[d]” this claim, saying it had listened to Tierney’s audio during the whole game.)
It was, in fact, both managers who gave angry press conferences about Tierney. Spurs interim-to-the-interim boss Ryan Mason, who had given the emotional performance of a lifetime on the touchline, demanded an “explanation” about how Tierney hadn’t given Jota a red card, especially as Diogo had gone on to score the winner. One sympathizes with Mason, not only because his side’s brave comeback was stifled, but also because his own playing career was ended in 2017 by a head injury—he is only 31 now, coaching some players who are older than he. In the end, Liverpool’s victory had a strong aftertaste about it—I felt we didn’t, based on our performance, deserve three points, and clearly everyone felt wronged
EVERTON LEVEL, IWOBI ON THE HALF-VOLLEY! DWIGHT MCNEIL PLAYMAKING LIKE DE BRUYNE! SEAN DYCHE’S MOUTH CONTORTING INTO A KIND OF SMILE!
by the officiating. I did chuckle slightly, and admiringly, at this video of two spurs fans watching the end of the game:
When Richarlison’s goal goes in, they do a full-throated rendition of a song about him; when Jota’s finds the back of the net, you can see (in their eyes) the moment when they realize that they’ve seen this movie before. “This club, man,” one of them exclaims. Truly all the best to these guys at WeAreTottenhamTV.
VARDY MISSES FROM FOUR YARDS, HEADING LIGHTLY ONTO TARKOWSKI’S FOREHEAD!
III: Liverpool’s “top four hopes”
Finally, a programming note of sorts. Liverpool have won four straight, have six wins and two draws in their last 10, and look to be recovering stretches of serious quality (if not quite consistency) against good opponents.
Top four—and Champions League qualification, and the money coming with that—are still a long way off. FiveThirtyEight gives Liverpool a 9% chance—Klopp & Co. need to unseat Manchester United (consistently good) or Newcastle (flying) to claim a spot.
In some ways, though, it’s nice to see Liverpool playing well even when it’s not “for” something—Europa League qualification, from a 5th-place finish, would be nice, but is unlikely to mean much in the grand scheme of things, and would result in a body-taxing Thursday-Sunday schedule. (Just ask Arsenal, who lost their best defender to a Europa League knockout match this year.)
The point is, it is nice at this point to imagine that Liverpool are playing well just to play well. There are always other motives, yes—players want to prove themselves, or keep their spots; owners want to protect their stock, literal and figurative; managers want to keep their reputations intact. But, in a season where we won’t win anything, it truly enjoyable and important to see these half-hour stretches of inspiration and domination. Liverpool’s schedule gets easier from here in, and instead of hoping we’ll unseat teams above us, I’ll just watch for the moments.
FT: LEICESTER 2-2 EVERTON. LIKE WATCHING A HEAVYWEIGHT FIGHT GO THE DISTANCE. INCREASINGLY TIRED MEN SLUG EACH OTHER AND STRUGGLE TO REMAIN UPRIGHT.