Technique must now be matched by physique and Klopp’s side used old English virtues to blow away a decadent Barcelona
Talk all you want about great European nights. Talk of the swell of the crowd, the roaring emotion inside Anfield. Talk of St-Étienne and Olympiakos and Borussia Dortmund. Talk of glory and heart and implausible goalscoring heroes, of Fabinho’s energy, Trent Alexander-Arnold’s wit and Jordan Henderson doing it on one leg. All that played its part. But talk also of Barcelona’s impotence in the maelstrom, of the familiarity of their problems, and conversely of the way in which Jürgen Klopp has resurrected the great historical virtue of English football: its power.
When a three-goal advantage is overturned, of course it is a surprise (even now, when such things seem to happen on an almost weekly basis in the Champions League). Just because the underlying causes can, with hindsight, be traced, the improbability of what happened should not be downplayed. The silliness of the away goals rule meant the tie was weighted even further in Barcelona’s favour: Tuesday’s second leg effectively started 3.5-0 given the impact a goal for them would have had on the tie. Plus Lionel Messi, plus Luis Suárez, minus Mohamed Salah, minus Roberto Firmino: of course this was a shock. And yet look at the two legs as a whole, look at the balance of play, and what was freakish was not the scoreline at Anfield in the second leg but what had happened at Camp Nou.
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