Only four nights previously the old imperious Liverpool had swept Galatasaray away in the Champions League. Anfield had soared and swooned to see England’s defending champions remembering who they are. Then the team hit the road to Brighton and turned ordinary again.
Fixture compression, with a Saturday lunchtime kick-off: yes. Fatigue of mind and body: probably. A Brighton revival that has generated four wins in five league games: indisputably. But when all the context is laid out the teams have to go out there and show who, where and what they are.
The ‘where’ is the easy part. Liverpool are stumbling towards a Champions League quarter-final against PSG, and, if they win that, a semi-final against Bayern Munich or Real Madrid. The FA Cup quarter-final against Manchester City exudes similar glamour.
Framed that way, Liverpool are still in the big time, the limelight of great Anfield sides down the ages. But for those immortal teams, it would have been anathema to use a midweek Champions League engagement as justification for such an anaemic performance four days later, with a top four/five finish a vital target for a club who spent £446m reinforcing the squad that wore the crown.
Brighton deserve better than for the focus to be on Arne Slot’s team when they are on such a good run – and when two more Danny Welbeck goals made Dominic Solanke’s selection ahead of him in Thomas Tuchel’s extended England squad seem even more unjust.
“The only thing I can say to Danny is – control the controllables,” said Brighton’s manager Fabian Hürzeler. “The media will go hard on this and his 12 goals, but even more important for me is how he functions as a connector; how he connects the different cultures in our team – to be that social leader. If you want to achieve something in a World Cup, that’s an attitude that definitely helps.”
Talking of England, Brighton did manage to squeeze one name into Tuchel’s squad, while no Liverpool player made the list for the fourth camp in a row. Jason Steele, Brighton’s 35-year-old back-up keeper, will be in Tuchel’s group to help with training. For Liverpool, the services of Curtis Jones and Joe Gomez were not required. Not since Bobby Robson’s 1986 squad in Mexico had England turned up at a World Cup without a Liverpool player.
To see Brighton sweeping through Liverpool’s ranks and Slot’s defenders desperately smashing the ball out of defence will have been painfully familiar to the away supporters.
Not wishing to make “excuses,” Slot paraded a litany of what he would probably prefer to be called extenuating circumstances.
Slot talked about the absences of Mo Salah and Alisson Becker and the injury that removed Hugo Ekitike after seven minutes. He mentioned playing players in positions “they’re not used to,” and referred to other Champions League teams having more rest.
Newsletters
Choose the newsletters you want to receive
View more
For information about how The Observer protects your data, read our Privacy Policy
Liverpool have conceded eight goals in the 90th minute (including stoppage time) this season. Only Leeds have conceded more. And that seemed to bother Slot more than tripping up here. “That goal in the 90th minute last week is an even bigger problem than losing at Brighton,” Slot said. “Everything I say, people will seize as excuses, but to be fair to them they were very good. They were the better team. Looking at the league table hurts a lot.”
The two Liverpools were in stark contrast. They had 32 attempts against Turkey’s champions on Wednesday night – 16 of them on target. On the south coast the corresponding numbers were 12 and five. Even their best player, Dominik Szoboszlai, grew so frustrated that he resorted to sending rockets down channels to avoid Brighton’s press.
Florian Wirtz was innocuous. Not for the first time Ibrahima Konaté was way below Liverpool centre-back level. Steven Gerrard meanwhile was not the only pundit to observe that young Rio Ngumoha would have been a far more effective starter than Cody Gapko. Liverpool’s inability to control this type of game is damning.
“The plan was to be more intense than Liverpool,” said Hürzeler, who was booked, again, this time for waving an imaginary card and will now serve a two-game ban. But his plan worked, despite Milos Kerkez exploiting an error by Lewis Dunk to bring Liverpool level at half-time.
Little over a month ago Hürzeler was subjected to chants of “you’re getting sacked in the morning” from Brighton fans. “That’s football. When you stay calm, when you don’t overreact, when you avoid the noise, when you focus on the kind of things you can control – these sorts of things [an improvement in results] can happen.”
This fourth win since 21 February drew a compliment from Slot: “It’s nice to have a season ticket here [at the Amex], because the team wants to play.”
Hürzeler was touched by that endorsement of his playing style, and his refusal to abandon it under audience pressure. He said: “I want to go home and look in the mirror and say, yeah, that’s me.”
Photography by Justin Setterfield/Getty Images