Neville’s nine-word confusion sums up Liverpool ‘madness’ as losing streak broken

“What Emi Martinez is doing I have no idea,” said Gary Neville at half time.

It is a ponderance many have deliberated over for years of an adult male who once tried to undress Neal Maupay during a Premier League game, spent the summer trying to engineer a move to the worst Manchester United team in modern history and pretended the World Cup Golden Glove was a penis in front of mildly unimpressed Saudi officials and a global television audience of 1.5 billion.

But in this instance it was something rather less fundamentally politically risky, if still problematic for Aston Villa.

The visitors had acquitted themselves well enough at Anfield, approaching half time having hit the post and crossbar through Morgan Rogers and Matty Cash. Two teams who had taken remarkably circuitous and contrasting routes to 15 points after nine games had unsurprisingly found precious few separating factors between them.

But Villa, as Neville put it, had been “creating problems for themselves” through an approach he described as “madness”. With set pieces now murdering the fabric of the entire sport, it feels like an age since Passing It Out From The Back was the moral panic du jour.

Unai Emery’s insistence on doing so at Anfield saw Villa lose possession a handful of times in their own defensive third in the first, including when Dominik Szoboszlai nicked the ball off the toes of Pau Torres before side-footing a weak effort into Martinez’s arms when clean through.

Martinez, ever the charitable soul, took it upon himself to simplify Liverpool’s task further with a blind pass to Torres in stoppage time, snaring the defender in a trap the lurking Mo Salah had already set.

Salah burst forward and stroked the ball into the net, Martinez having decided that closing the passing angle to Cody Gakpo was a necessity worth leaving half his goal open to one of the best forwards the Premier League has ever seen.

It was a choice. Or a series of them. Bad ones. That’s what we’re saying here.

Of course, the idea that Passing It Out From The Back was the issue for Villa was slightly undermined when, in the second half, Torres lumping the ball forward aimlessly was turned into a second Liverpool goal in the course of three passes.

The problem is rarely in the idea and always in the execution. And Villa found a couple of different ways to make a mess of things.

Liverpool still had to first take advantage and then remain resolute. The first three of those four consecutive defeats saw them go behind, equalise and then concede late winners. They have to relearn the beauty of routine, boring victories, having not won by at least two clear goals without conceding in 28 games.

Arne Slot needed this: an end to the run of defeats; a clean sheet; a Salah goal; a Liverpool side that at last and at least resembled its best self at times. The result was more important than the performance but both represented steps in the right direction.

And thanks ought to be reserved for Martinez, who might be readying himself for more awkward conversations with his manager.