Ngumoha and Wirtz clean up the mess after Liverpool completely sh*t the bed

We’re bored of saying it and you’re bored of hearing it, but there’s such an odd flatness now to what are supposed to be the Great European Nights Under The Lights.

The old Champions League group stage was not without its many flaws. It certainly wasn’t overburdened with jeopardy. But it had more about it than this 36-team behemoth we have now, a bloated procession of almost zero tangible significance to the teams with realistic sights set on the latter stages. A format that twice in two years has been mercilessly mocked by PSG largely sacking off the league phase altogether and simply backing themselves to steamroll their way through the knockout games that actually matter in the last few months of the season from whatever lowly qualifying position they end up occupying.

It is worth noting that such an approach is easier for the likes of PSG, who can generally rely pretty safely on the idea that their domestic work will largely be done by that time, allowing them a focus on the Champions League that is rarely afforded the English clubs who instead have thus tended to bulldoze the largely meaningless parts of the competition only to come apart at the seams when it starts to matter.

The dispiriting thing about Liverpool’s approach to a Champions League game against Villarreal that ended up being astonishing and baffling and enormous fun to watch but despite its eye-catching 4-3 scoreline never really got you in the feels is that the visibly obvious fact that Andoni Iraola is prioritising a Premier League game against Brighton at the weekend over this was and is entirely the correct and logical course of action.

The result of that game could mean everything come the end of the season. This one? Well, a lot of fun, sure, but it certainly won’t Mean More.

It was an oddity of an evening in many ways, perhaps most of all the fact that Liverpool kind of 4D-chessed their way to the best possible outcome. It’s hard to overstate just how bad they were in the first 35 minutes here, in which they fell 2-0 down and the players played as if taking part in some kind of collective Mike Dean-style banter to see who could make the most egregious error. Virgil van Dijk has to take the prize, and we have to assume they’d not involved young Rio Ngumoha in the fun and games.

But by yawning and sleepwalking their way to a carelessly self-inflicted 2-0 deficit against a Villarreal team that outran, outthought and outcompeted Liverpool utterly for most of the first half, Iraola’s side in fact set themselves up for a stirring comeback that actually gave the match some semblance of the atmosphere and vibe it had been so sorely lacking.

During Liverpool’s bad times and good times in this game, there was one clear standout, one exception to the staid atmosphere. Ngumoha was spectacular, exciting and spectacularly exciting. There’s a particular noise that a packed football stadium makes when a player like Ngumoha gets on the ball. You know the one. A kind of anticipatory collective drawing of breath in the expectation that something magical might be about to happen.

Again and again tonight, it did. And, eventually, the teenager was able to drag his far more experienced team-mates along for the ride.

Liverpool were, inexplicably, level before half-time. Alexis Mac Allister once again proved himself the Heir of Cahill in the ‘surprisingly good in the air for a small man’ category to get Liverpool back in it, before Ngumoha’s fast feet and even faster brain turned all the promise of his lone hand of a first half into something tangible with a clipped cross that Villarreal stood and watched to allow the gambling Ronald Araujo to sneak in at the back post and head home.

Nobody would have been more relieved than Van Dijk, who was already on his second of three conspicuous errors within the first seven minutes when gift-wrapping Villarreal the lead with a bungled attempt to head back to Alisson under minimal pressure.

When Liverpool were carved open for the second goal it all started to look distinctly unpleasant.

But an unexpected first-half comeback was followed by very expected second-half improvement. Ngumoha’s second assist put Mac Allister’s second goal on a platter, before Florian Wirtz, enjoying one of his better nights in Liverpool red as a second-half sub, stroked home a precise fourth.

There was still time for more defensive frailty to hand Villarreal a third and with it a grandstand finish, but Liverpool held on to a win they just about merited on topsy-turvy balance, and now have one foot in the knockouts after three wins from three.

Job done, then. And conditions accidentally created that allowed Wirtz the absolute freedom to perform in the second half knowing it was almost scientifically impossible to be worse than the first-half offering while cementing Ngumoha’s boy-wonder status thanks to his obvious but on this occasion unique decision to actually play well in both halves.

We still don’t really know what Iraola’s Liverpool are, but we are now more convinced than ever that it’s going to be enormous fun finding out. Which of tonight’s Liverpools were the real Liverpool? The first-half wastrels? The purring second-half machine? The distracted and half-arsed Van Dijk? The magnificent Ngumoha? Any of them? None of them? All of them?

Do you give credit for the way Liverpool turned it around? Or chastise the abject sloppiness that left them needing to tidy a mess almost entirely of their own making?

How much credit, ultimately, do you give anyone for successfully washing the sheets after they themselves have so thoroughly shat the entirety of the bed?

We’ll tell you at the end of the season.

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