For all that most people would always have considered the result an inevitability, there was little that was predictable about this game. Even once Liverpool took control in the final half-hour there rarely seemed any sense to its shifts in momentum. Like a leaf in a windstorm for long periods it tumbled gently in no particular direction, before zigging and zagging through a series of sudden, unexpected and often inexplicable turns. It was an extraordinary match in a bewildering and often underwhelming way, stuffed with a combination of the surprising and the indefensible.
Two goals came from centre-backs giving the ball away, two from the penalty spot, one from an inexplicable handball, one (scored by the goalkeeper’s team) from a goalkeeping fumble, another from the same keeper not so much coming for the ball as going for a stroll in its general direction. Goals are generally considered the high points of a game of football; here, with one wonderful exception, the opposite was true. “My overriding feeling is frustration that the goals were so poor,” Russell Martin said. “If they produce a moment of magic you can maybe accept it a bit more but the quality of the goals was so bad. So bad.”
