This is what it was all about

Faithful readers of this fan blog know our specialty isn’t statistics or analysis. Around here, we deal in vibes.

To keep to form: after Liverpool Football Club’s fifth win from five games on Wednesday, after our new-look club’s Champions League campaign opener and new shiny object Alexander Isak’s club debut, we can confirm the obvious. The vibes are very good indeed.  

They are good because the thrilling spectacle of an injury-time winner rather than a frustrating draw or worse has become routine business for Arne Slot’s crew in 2025-2026. They are good because the troubling trend of coughing up a two-goal lead – still as yet attributable to all the new parts coming together rather than some major flaw – was lost amid everything else: the sound of Anfield under the midweek lights, the fury of Diego Simeone at coming to Merseyside and, in the end, seeing him beaten at his own game.

They are good because, in a preposterous development that was long-simmering but only noticed by me when it was pointed out, Virgil van Dijk’s tally of 25 headed goals since his January 2018 arrival gives him more headed goals than any other player in Europe’s top five leagues aside from Robert Lewandowski, Harry Kane, Karim Benzema, and Ante Budimir. (Look up the last fellow as we did if you must, but those are all elite center-forwards.)

And they are good because this game showed what the summer “rebuild,” if that is what you can call subjecting the English champions to a drastic improvement at nearly every inch of the pitch, was really all about: the small matter of winning this particular tournament.

Give Arsenal their due: they played eventual champions PSG decently well in the semifinal – a far sight better than Inter in the disastrous final – but not as well as the version of Liverpool that is now a faint memory after all that’s happened since.

And now look at what we have.

Most casual observers would do the normal thing and focus attention on the third, winning goal. This is understandable for the reasons stated above. Coming yet again in injury time, coming from a center-half – it was all extraordinary. But I want to draw attention to the first two goals.

I want to draw attention to Isak and to Florian Wirtz, because that is where Diego Simeone clearly focused Atlético Madrid’s.

Working backwards, both goals began the same way. Both times, Ryan Gravenberch, Liverpool Football Club’s defensive midfielder, received in the ball steps from Atlético’s penalty area. Both times, he pulled a nifty give-and-go. The first time he drew a foul. The second time he took two touches and put the ball into the path of Mohamed Salah and three hapless defenders.

Working even further backwards: how did Ryan Gravenberch, our defensive midfielder, have so much space?

In the first, look at the 18-yard box. See Alexander Isak and Atleti’s entire back four in a five-man conga line, broken only when Clément Lenglet raced towards Gravenberch and the ball where all he could do was foul. Look closer to the touchline, and see another three Atleti players circle around Wirtz and Dominik Szoboszlai.

In the second, look at the box again. See five Atleti players there, this time around Wirtz and Isak, giving Gravenberch the honor of enjoying the same putting green-sized lawn by himself.

This is all to say that Simeone did the predictable thing and tried to gum up the game in the old ways: clogging lanes, fouling, giving the ball to Marcos Llorente. And in the span of the first six minutes, it failed spectacularly. It did not work.

It did not work because Wirtz, about whom you may have heard the more excitable or distractable observers complain, probably around the time Salah clanged a pass off the post or Hugo Ekitike did his first Darwin Nunez impression, was in fact an absolute menace.  

It didn’t work because Isak gave the first hint of why, after breaking the bank on Wirtz, John Henry and Co. broke it again on the striker who – you can argue, at 23 goals last year on an xG of 20.42 – is among the best at creating something very big out of something very little. It didn’t work because “old man” Andy Robertson still has plenty in the tank, and will have more to burn in this tournament the longer Milos Kerkez keeps his act together against the likes of Burnley.

Back to the vibes for a minute. Sometimes a big moment grows only in hindsight. Mo Salah, winner of most every individual accolade available, wants to win Liverpool’s seventh Champions League trophy more than he can adequately express with words. He and Virgil van Dijk, both of whom have been there before and been on both ends of it, are at the center of this new dazzling universe. They have drawn Isak and Wirtz, both of whom could walk onto just about any team in history, into this orbit.

And here we are too, along for the ride. This is the trip we planned and paid for.

The margins remain thin. This team hasn’t hammered anybody yet in the way a big scary juggernaut should, and it seems unlikely that David Moyes and Jack Grealish’s Everton will be the first victim. But the biggest lesson from Wednesday is that things are still coming together. And they’re coming together with a clear mission: big trophy number seven.