At least this time there were shots fired.
The only trouble was, long before this bruising Battle of Britain beating was over, almost all of them were flying at will beyond Allan McGregor and into the Rangers net. Yes, Rangers made a decent fist of it for 45 minutes. They even took an early lead when Scott Arfield scored their first goal of an otherwise pretty wretched Champions League group campaign. But just when it seemed as if they might salvage some pride from this performance, they were machine gunned in a second-half blitz that robbed them of whatever dignity they had left on their way through Group A’s trapdoor and out of the competition. Roberto Firmino stole the show with an individual display sprinkled with magic dust.
Then Mo Salah came off the bench to finish off the job with a hat-trick in little more than six second-half minutes as a humbling defeat turned into an utter annihilation. Darwin Nunez pinched one in between times and then, in the dying moments, Harvey Elliott helped himself to Liverpool’s seventh. It was brutal. It was merciless. And it completed a campaign of misery for Giovanni van Bronckhorst, who could scarcely believe what he was witnessing as his team were being butchered.
