How Liverpool’s men taught Chelsea’s boys a lesson in the small things

It was men against boys at Stamford Bridge. That’s not as scathing as it sounds. Men are what boys aspire to be. They fight, they fix things, they make themselves heard, they have all the power. But there are advantages to being a boy, too. Boys are full of vigour and energy and dreams. They have whims and idiosyncracies and a great, glistening future. They have all the time in the world, and none of the patience.

Maturity has taught Liverpool a few lessons that Chelsea are yet to learn. That the struggle is grim, but worth it. That great joy comes out of great pain. That life gives you plenty of opportunities, but no guarantees. And so sometimes you simply have to grit your teeth, harden your heart and scrap out a 2-1 win with two set-piece goals and a load of backs-to-the-wall defending.

It wasn’t that Liverpool didn’t deserve the points. Technically and tactically, they were the superior side, particularly in the first half when they fizzed the ball around with aplomb, won the contact, took their chances superbly. But as Chelsea found a second wind in the second half, as Liverpool briefly wavered in the face of Chelsea’s renewed hope, these are the sorts of games that boys often lose and men often win. 

Sometimes they come down to a single chance, like the one that Mason Mount snatched at late on, which would have earned Chelsea at least a point. But more broadly, they come down to smarts: knowing when to make the tactical foul, knowing when to take the extra touch and when to bunt it out for a throw, knowing the the right decision to make in adversity, knowing that there’s no column in the Premier League table for style points. 

Over the last couple of years, Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool have become experts at this sort of thing, perhaps even better than Manchester City. Think of the number of wins they ground out last season as they pursued a rampant City during that epic title run-in: late wins, ugly wins, kicking-down-the-door wins. Often these sorts of games were seen as evidence of Liverpool’s superior desire, but there’s more to it than that. The ugly win is as much about patience as passion, as much about nous as nerve. When things are going well, Liverpool can play with beauty and grace. When they’re not, they never forget that football is above all a game of small numbers.

Liverpool are so good at the really small things. Look at Sadio Mane winning the free-kick from which Trent Alexander-Arnold opened the scoring: a free-kick that really he had no business winning at all. For all the wonderful things Mane does with the ball, this was a masterful use of the body: positioning, weight transfer, brute strength, the complex system of levers and pulleys that not only shields the ball, but convinces a referee that there’s no possible way of winning it legally.

Or look at Roberto Firmino’s movement in the build-up to the second goal. There may be better strikers in the Premier League, but I’m not sure there’s anyone as instinctively good at probing a defence, pressing and nudging until he finds its weak point. Here, as Liverpool lined up for an Andy Robertson free-kick, Firmino first took up a position next to Mateo Kovacic, then Fikayo Tomori, before finally nestling in alongside his team-mate Virgil van Dijk.

Here was Firmino at work: reading the bodies around him like a puzzle, working out where the fissures might appear. As the ball swung in, Firmino disentangled himself from van Dijk, attacked the space in between Andreas Christensen and Marcos Alonso, and the rest was pure will. Chelsea defend zonally at set pieces, but when Firmino is in the mood, he is the zone: a barrelling tornado of mutton and hubris, willing himself to get to the ball before you, on the basis that he’s Roberto Firmino, and you’re not.

Perhaps Chelsea’s biggest flaw over the last couple of seasons has been their inability to unearth a Firmino. They had Diego Costa, of course, a hugely underrated striker who bullied his way to two Premier League titles largely through scowling, and who they have been trying and failing to replace ever since. Olivier Giroud could approximate his aerial ability and link play; Alvaro Morata his cold finishing; Michy Batshuayi his sharp movement and Tammy Abraham his hustling runs in the channels. But none has been able to reproduce the full package, and perhaps it’s no coincidence that Chelsea haven’t come near the title since.

Still, they have qualities of their own: a certain boyish impudence, the cheek to keep running and running at a brick wall all afternoon. With 20 minutes to go, N’Golo Kante pulled a goal back with a lovely slink and slalom, followed by the most gleefully childlike finish of them all: the toe poke into the top corner. But there was a good deal of wasted energy, too: chances going begging, intercepted passes, a lot of pointless charging down of Liverpool players who had plenty of time on the ball. 

But this is the sort of thing that comes with time. These are, after all, two teams at different stages of development. The sort of collective muscle memory that Liverpool possess, where one action instinctively impels three others, where the movements are so well-oiled they become instinctive, takes months if not years to generate. The likes of Abraham and Mount are quality players who deserve time to develop, time to learn, and due to Chelsea’s unique transfer circumstances, will get it.

Equally, Frank Lampard is no Romford AVB. He’s a manager at the very start of his career, with ideas and enthusiasm and a healthy knack of learning from his mistakes. Already his Chelsea side are no longer leaving the sort of dreadful gaps in midfield that were so common during the early weeks of the season. There’s a plan and a pattern there, a recognisable style of play and a boyish single-mindedness. There’ll be moments of promise, moments of frustration, moments of madness and moments of pure inspiration. Equally, as Chelsea discovered today, the sharp end of the Premier League is a tough place to do your growing up.