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Jota, Darwin and Bradley ensure Liverpool cope just fine without Salah and Alexander-Arnold

This might be the best example yet of a Liverpool 2023/24 performance.

More often than not, this has been the case. It also had the distinctly Liverpool quality of being far, far better in the second half than the first.

It’s a win that will be glossed over by others as ‘only Bournemouth’ when Bournemouth’s only defeats in their last 10 games have come away at Manchester City and Tottenham. They haven’t lost a home league game in three months, and were at that point a very different prospect.

But its most Liverpool quality of all was the manner in which they simply coped with problems placed in their way, adapted, and got it done. The two most influential attacking footballers for Liverpool are Mo Salah and Trent Alexander-Arnold. Neither was available here, and yet they ran in four goals in an inspired second-half performance where neither man was missed.

Darwin Nunez started and finished the scoring and will inevitably attract much of the attention because he’s that kind of footballer. For good or bad, it’s rare for Darwin to turn in a performance that can be described as anonymous.

It may well prove an important day for Darwin, who remains the sort of player who could absolutely embark on a hot streak of scoring on the back of such an afternoon. Perhaps he was inspired by the earlier efforts of a kindred spirit. But the most important performance of the afternoon for Liverpool was that of Diogo Jota. Nominally playing through the middle of a flexible and fluid front three, he teed up the opener in a delightfully slick passing move early in the second half and then scored the next two. All three goals came from him taking up inside-right positions. It wasn’t quite a Salahesque performance, but the output certainly was. Two goals and an assist is precisely the sort of thing Jurgen Klopp would have been hoping for from one of his other forwards in the absence of his best one.

There were other impressive performances in green and white, with Alexis Mac Allister and Ibrahima Konate both eye-catching in an otherwise worryingly if understandably disjointed and off-pace Liverpool performance. But if Darwin will get most of the headlines and Diogo Jota second billing then it would be remiss not to mention Conor Bradley.

Klausgocrazy

Just a young trench kid tryna make a living out in this cold world.

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