There’s been a bit of a recurring theme this season where Liverpool mostly either play poorly and drop points or play pretty well but still manage to drop points, be it through perplexing individual errors or moments where the team collectively shut off or through questionable refereeing decisions.
Which means that any time things do go well—performances, results, or even as happened on Tuesday night a referee made a questionable decision benefitting them—the talk tends to turn quickly to the question of whether maybe, this time around, they can find a way to meaningfully build on a good result.
“We all needed it,” left back Andy Robertson said of Tuesday’s 1-0 victory over Inter Milan. “The club as a whole needed it. We’re not in the best moment. We know results haven’t been good enough, we know performances haven’t been good enough. So, it’s important this club is in the Champions League.
“When you are, you have to competebecause the supporters expect us to go far. So we need to up our performances, get through, and hopefully build momentum. So, it was a huge result for all of us. We know how important being in that top eight is and avoiding a play-off in terms of an extra two games.”
As for the penalty the Reds got late in the second half to win the game, with an Inter defender pulling on Florian Wirtz’ shirt and Wirtz happily accepting the gift for a call that would have had Liverpool and the fans fuming had it been in the other direction, in some ways it could be called a balancing.
In the first half, a corner made what appeared accidental, incidental contact with Hugo Ekitike’s arm while it was in a natural position and close to the shoulder before falling to Ibrahima Konaté to put it home. By the current rule set, the broad consensus was it should have stood. Instead, it was chalked off.
“The handball, I think it took maybe seven or eight minutes to get to the conclusion,” was Robertson’s response when asked about the penalty Liverpool later got for the Wirtz incident. “If you do that, I think you have to stick with the on field decision. That’s my opinion. It can’t be taking that long like that.
“So, I think if it takes that long for the ref and for the VAR to make a decision, then I think that you’ve got to just stick to what the decision was. So then the penalty we got, it looked soft—it did look soft for a penalty—but anywhere else on the pitch it gets given as a foul and thankfully for us we got it.”
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