Pancake Tuesday, and where better to spend an all-flippin’ chunk of it than at Anfield for a Champions League tussle between Liverpool and Real Madrid, a potentially very tremendous rematch of last season’s final.
The pair might both be struggling, by their lofty standards, in their respective leagues this season, but at least their faithful are soothed by Manchester United and Barcelona playing, a touch humiliatingly, in the Europa League.
As the crowd oft croons: “Oh what a night, watching Liverpool on a Tuesday night, you play Thursday ‘cos you’re f**king shite, what a feeling, what a night.”
Truly, football chant lyricists are the Bob Dylan of our time.
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BT Sport, as is their wont, opted for impartiality for the night that was in it, only picking four ex-Liverpool players for their panel of five – Stevie G Gerrard, Michael Owenie Owen, Peter Crouchie Crouch and Steve Macca McManaman – leaving Rio Ferdie Ferdinand a desperately lonely man.
In fairness, Owenie and Macca also once played for Madrid, so technically they were neutrals, but.
Stevie G, his forehead still creased from the experience of managing Aston Villa, set the theme, the outcome of the contest would depend, he said, on which Liverpool turned up: the muck one, or the team that is on a two-game winning streak, having rediscovered their mojo against Everton and Newcastle.
Rio didn’t disagree, although he tentatively pointed out that Madrid are “an absolute Champions-League-winning-machine”, having won five of the last nine, so if they too turned up, there was a reasonable chance they might fare reasonably well.
People have been awarded the Victoria Cross for less, Rio’s courage in making this point, while surrounded by Scousers – reading from the citation here – “a daring or pre-eminent act of valour or self-sacrifice, or extreme devotion to duty in the presence of the enemy”.
Match time. A quiet first-half, if you exclude the four goals, one of them a worldie of a back-heeler from Darwin Nunez, a ‘mare from Thibaut Courtois, an Exocet missile from Vinicius Junior, and a ‘mare from Alisson. In other words, flippin’ marvellous stuff.
“Where do you start with a game like that,” Darragh Maloney asked Liam Brady and Stephen Kelly at half-time, but neither had a clue, those 45 minutes proving deliciously unanalysable.
“2-2, it could have been 4-4,” said Liam, Stephen not disagreeing (and neither, incidentally – and this is a compete by-the-by, possibly even sexist – will anyone dispute the fact that he is the most dapper pundit of our times, what with that suit, handkerchief and splendiferous coiffed hair-do. But we digress).
Liam, by the way, had laid into Trent Alexander-Arnold pre-match, describing him as a “day dreamer”, excellent going forward, but a liability in the defending department, suggesting that Jürgen Klopp was in denial about the lad’s deficiencies.
This observation has, of course, been made many times before, to the point where an exasperated Gareth Southgate even tried him out in midfield, but come the second half, the one consolation for the TAA fan club (guilty m’lud – you can forgive anyone when their right foot is a wand), he wasn’t the most guilty in that Liverpool meltdown.
2-3. Eder Militao heads home Luka Modric’s free.
2-4. Joe Gomez helps guide Karim Benzema’s shot past Alisson.
2-5. Benzema again, Liverpool’s defending …. no words, like.
“He’s the coolest man on the plant,” Macca said of Benzema, “‘ave some of that.”
By now, a despondent Macca was half tempted to distance himself from having ever been associated with Liverpool, eager to stress his Madrid links, while over on RTÉ, Ray Houghton sounded similarly down in the dumps, maybe tempted to remind Des Curran that the high point of his career came at Oxford United.
All over, 2-5, a game and a half, marginally bonkers, entirely beguiling.
“They’ve taken Liverpool to the cleaners,” said BT’s Darren Fletcher, “the mountain Liverpool will have to climb in Madrid will be extremely steep.”
It will, but sure look, they’ve been on or about the top of Everest in recent seasons, so we’ll see.
Liam, though, wasn’t convinced an ascent of that magnitude was doable.
“The bubble’s burst … something’s gone dramatically wrong,” he said. And then he inserted his boot in to a certain Brazilian.
“Fabinho was awful, he was like an old man of my age.”
And then Liam went on to complete his Liverpool postmortem: dead and buried, he concluded. To the point where he thought they might even be lucky to play Thursday nights next season.
Oh what a night. For five-star Madrid.
