For all that most people would always have considered the result an inevitability, there was little that was predictable about this game. Even once Liverpool took control in the final half-hour there rarely seemed any sense to its shifts in momentum. Like a leaf in a windstorm for long periods it tumbled gently in no particular direction, before zigging and zagging through a series of sudden, unexpected and often inexplicable turns. It was an extraordinary match in a bewildering and often underwhelming way, stuffed with a combination of the surprising and the indefensible.
Two goals came from centre-backs giving the ball away, two from the penalty spot, one from an inexplicable handball, one (scored by the goalkeeper’s team) from a goalkeeping fumble, another from the same keeper not so much coming for the ball as going for a stroll in its general direction. Goals are generally considered the high points of a game of football; here, with one wonderful exception, the opposite was true. “My overriding feeling is frustration that the goals were so poor,” Russell Martin said. “If they produce a moment of magic you can maybe accept it a bit more but the quality of the goals was so bad. So bad.”
But for all that Southampton ended the game still with one win, four points adrift at the bottom of the table, with a very much unsated appetite for defensive self-destruction and a couple of fresh injuries to join an already extensive list, there were signs of hope here. Less because they were beaten only narrowly by theoretically much stronger opponents than in the feet of Tyler Dibling, the fearless 18-year-old who has already made England Under-19 and Under-21 debuts this season and looks anything but finished.
It was a dribbling Dibling who won the Saints’ penalty after turning Andy Robertson into terrified, backpedalling mush, and Dibling again who produced the excellent turn and pass that left Adam Armstrong with an easy opportunity to play in Mateus Fernandes, who duly capped the best move of the game. There might be nothing in the team’s recent results or in their upcoming fixtures – with four of their next five games against teams currently in the top six, including Liverpool’s return in the Carabao Cup – to bring fans skipping optimistically to St Mary’s of a matchday, but the promise of witnessing Dibling’s evolution, and that of Taylor Harwood-Bellis in defence, will probably do.
In a game full of random changes Southampton’s team sheet had a few of its own. It became a particularly baffling afternoon for Alex McCarthy, the 34-year-old who replaced the injured Aaron Ramsdale in goal and brought to the game not so much the calm head of an experienced pro as the flailing arms of a drowning man. Meanwhile Flynn Downes played at centre-half and Ryan Fraser was deployed at left-back because, Martin explained, “we tried to have as many attacking players on the pitch as we could”.
Fraser’s selection, putting him in direct opposition to the most destructive wide forward in the country in Mohamed Salah, seemed an act of almost callous cruelty. He walked onto the pitch much as a chicken skewer is carried to a barbecue, not so much prepared as marinaded. But thanks in part to an unusually inefficient display from Salah he was barely singed before being shifted after half an hour to the indirect heat of the opposite flank.
By then Salah should probably have scored a couple, most memorably blasting at McCarthy after being found at the far post with Fraser nowhere to be seen. Kyle Walker-Peters attempted to shadow him for the remainder of the match, and was tellingly slipped for the 65th-minute goal that tipped it in Liverpool’s favour. From there Salah probably should have given the game an unfairly one-sided sheen, scoring a penalty, shooting over the bar when a goal seemed more likely, thudding a drive into the base of the near post.
Before the game Arne Slot had spoken about how the quality possessed by the division’s bottom side illustrated the unique strength of the Premier League. Anyone witnessing the often numb, clumsy struggles of the division’s leaders and title favourites here might have drawn a very different conclusion. There was mitigation, in a squad recently reassembled after an international break, in the violent squall they were forced to play in, and in the pouring rain that doused the second half.
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For an hour they struggled to carve open a patched-up, makeshift and frequently kamikaze defence or to beat a goalkeeper who could barely kick or, for that matter, catch. “We know how difficult it is to win a game,” Slot said. They have done it 10 times now in 12 and if it hasn’t become any easier, it is gradually getting more exciting.
