The last surviving 100% record in this season’s Champions League disappeared at Anfield along with Liverpool’s 28-game unbeaten home run, a sequence stretching back one year and one day, and yet it was a night of reward for Jürgen Klopp. A place in the quarter-finals of the Champions League is the prize that matters, and sufficient to console the Liverpool manager following a 1-0 defeat by Internazionale, but the resilience shown against the Italian champions will also offer compensation as the business end of the season approaches.
Praising Liverpool’s defensive work may seem strange on a night where the main talking points were Alexis Sánchez’s debatable dismissal and a superb finish from Lautaro Martínez, the striker profiting from a loose clearance by Joël Matip and Virgil van Dijk backing off as he shaped to shoot into the top corner from distance.
