Five touches, 10 seconds, one utterly absurd Liverpool goal

There were, in the end, plenty of things to talk about from Sunday’s game at the London Stadium. Liverpool’s title bid rekindled after a tremendous week in London, West Ham’s fine recent run brought to an emphatic if not hugely surprising end, Mohamed Salah’s Premier League goal drought brought to an emphatic if not hugely surprising conclusion, the perennial debate about how late and how futile a consolation goal should be before West Ham consider not setting off the bubble machines.

But really, there’s only one thing to talk about. It’s not the result, or its wider implications or even those f***ing bubbles. Sometimes something happens in football that is just so good and so spectacular that it doesn’t matter what else it means. It should just be enjoyed on its own terms. Liverpool’s second goal in an ultimately routine 3-1 win that takes them back up to fourth and reduces the gap to Manchester City to four points or something – not checked, it’s unimportant, don’t sully this moment with your vulgar price-taggery – is a prime example.

It’s a really, really, really, really good goal. An absurd goal. And like all the very best truly absurd goals, it has multiple absurdities before the finish provides the final, most dramatic, most piss-takingly brilliant absurdity of all. Ten seconds and half as many touches from defending a corner to putting the game out of sight. A headed clearance to Trent Alexander-Arnold. A swept crossfield ball to Xherdan Shaqiri, his little legs a blur, carrying him as fast as they possibly can, yet through the exhaustion able to spot and execute the first time looping, arcing, swerving ball past the solitary desperately back-pedalling West Ham defender into the run of Salah who takes one absurd touch with his right foot to bring the ball under his spell and then another with his left all in the same movement to clip the ball past Lukasz Fabianski and into the bottom corner. A preposterous goal. Both a stunning piece of individualism yet a true team affair, all done at breakneck pace yet with unhurried calm and composure. It will definitely get the Match of the Day stopwatch treatment later.

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Sadly, it wasn’t the goal that ended Salah’s goal drought. It’s our only criticism of it, that moment having come about 10 minutes earlier with a goal that was merely brilliant rather than soil-your-pants extraordinary. It came at a crucial time as well, and showed the fine margins that exist in these games.

West Ham were hugely disappointing on the night, starting from David Moyes all but giving the game up as a lost cause in his pre-match interview in which he dismissed the very idea of little West Ham (six straight wins in all competitions) even competing with mighty Liverpool (two wins in eight). The expectation management is understandable, and Moyes has more than earned leeway in recent months, but it was still dreary and dispiriting.

Yet Liverpool were equally as poor in a non-event of a first half that had us pining for the Leicester-Leeds fun and frolics that had preceded it. The second half, it’s fair to say, made up for the first. And for all West Ham’s mediocrity on the night after such an encouraging spell, the game ultimately hinged on two chances a couple of minutes apart. West Ham’s Michail Antonio curved the first just wide. Curtis Jones replaced a disgruntled James Milner and immediately set up Salah for a far less clear-cut chance, yet never for a second did you think he was doing anything other than shifting it out of his feet and away from the defender before curling it into the top corner to thoroughly change Milner’s mood. Six-game goal droughts or not, that ball was going nowhere else other than the West Ham net. Everyone knew it – Moyes had known it over an hour earlier – and nobody could do a thing to prevent it.

Two goals up and with Salah back among the goals against a very good team saddled with an inferiority complex, Liverpool started popping the ball around with the confidence of old and the third was no surprise and it was only then that West Ham – frustratingly, infuriatingly too late – began to play and got themselves a bubble-blowing consolation.

For West Ham – just like Spurs in midweek – the disappointment comes not so much in a 3-1 defeat to the reigning champions but in the manner of it. West Ham have shown they are better than this. It’s one game and one defeat; it should not derail them, but form and confidence are tricky things. Liverpool, meanwhile, have managed to relocate both and are right back amongst it.

Dave Tickner