Devastating second-half display sees Reds run riot

A vision of an alternative future turns into a brush with history.

- MIGUEL DELANEY

A vision of an alternative future turns into a brush with history. Xabi Alonso said he didn’t want to come to Liverpool as tourists and his Bayer Leverkusen certainly leave without any mementoes. Not a point. Not a goal. Not their pride. Not any hold on Luis Diaz, either, who hit a hat-trick. Leverkusen didn’t even see that much of the ball, as Liverpool translated almost 60 per cent possession into a comprehensive 4-0 win.

For all the inevitable focus on a former Liverpool Champions League winner who knew how to play a pass – and suffered a reckoning here – wins like this are maybe the moment when it’s worth going further back into the club’s European past. There is a genuinely noteworthy reference that comes from the last time Liverpool saw a charismatic figurehead replaced by a more placid character.

Bob Paisley once spoke of a realisation he had in the mid-1970s, when he was still bringing the club out of the Bill Shankly era, and Liverpool hadn’t yet won any of their six European Cups. “We realised it was no use winning the ball if you finished up in your backside. The Europeans showed us how to break out of defence effectively. We had to learn to be patient and think about the next two or three moves when we had the ball.”

Is the last sentence not the perfect description of Arne Slot’s Liverpool? That goes right up to how their control in the first half seems like a conservation of energy as much as anything, allowing them to burst late on in games – and maybe the season?