Aston Villa vs. Liverpool: *Bumper* Post-Match Analysis

Paul Tomkins, Andrew Beasley, Daniel Rhodes and other TTT regulars will give their thoughts on the match for 24 hours after the game, so the article received via email is unlikely to be the final version. There's statistics from the match and videos too.

Post-Match Thoughts

Paul Tomkins

I haven’t read the post-match comments yet, or any external reports (and I always turn off the TV at the final whistle), so I’m doing this as if the game had just finished, only with more time to think (and sleep).

It started in a depressing way, with fireworks, 40,000 plastic flags, fire-bursts and tannoy hysteria. The older I get, the more I loathe this kind of shit.

Clearly Villa were pulling out all the stops, and some random bloke who looked like Forest Gump was paying close attention.

It feels like Liverpool are almost the last club that doesn’t resort to the naff “fake” atmosphere building, with it still a largely organic process at Anfield. Aston Villa even stole our song, and sung it shamelessly.

I still hate all the orchestrated excess, that again, makes it feel more like entertainment than football, and the more entertainment matters, the more integrity gets squeezed out; just as ‘results at all costs’ in sport lead to cheating. If you want to make it feel like the wrestling, then it gains that kind of taint.

Entertainment is clearly more important than ever, in the attention economy, but the football is already entertaining; as the dinosaurs fall, one by one, leaving pretty much only Sean Dyche now. (He may win the league with Everton, on account of how no one knows how to play against 1980s football anymore.)

If you don’t like the football, go and watch fireworks displays.

Yet again the ref, this time Simon Hooper (another contemptuous of Jürgen Klopp), gave nothing to Liverpool in almost the entire first half, and the Villa fans still called him a Scouser, amidst various suggestions that Liverpool fans “sign on”. (Didn’t Birmingham recently go broke?)

Even giving Liverpool a free-kick in a game these days is a sign of favouring the Big Six or some bullshit.

Almost exactly as it was at Goodison, the foul count was 9-0 to the home side after 38 minutes.

This is not a natural distribution of fouls, but a pattern where refs let the opposition bully Liverpool and give Liverpool nothing in reply, for at least the first half. Only later do Liverpool then get a few decisions.

It wasn’t until the 41st minute for the bingo for first free-kick to the Reds, and 10-1 at half-time. It takes some doing to commit 10x the fouls with two-thirds the possession. It’s getting ridiculous.

Also, “You’d give that if it was him” screamed McGinn repeatedly to the ref when he got tackled, pointing to Mo Salah who robbed him of the ball; perhaps not realising that Salah almost never gets free-kicks, or perhaps just being a dickhead.

Fouls win in the league this season? Mo Salah, 25. Less than one per game, as per his usual record.

McGinn? 67! Sixty-fucking-seven!

In the last six seasons (for which data is available), McGinn has been awarded 464 free-kicks; Salah, less than half, at 208.

Obviously McGinn is the tricky, goalscoring winger who tore past players at pace since 2018 (until about 2023), and Salah is the walking fat-arse midfield thug whose game involves kicking people up in the air (and who doesn’t like it when anyone tackles him, and seems to spend the entire game moaning at the ref until he gets what he wants).

Think about that. Think about what McGinn is saying, the facts, and the way he reacted towards the ref. It’s not corruption, it’s a kind of paranoia from the likes of McGinn about the likes of Salah, that refs bow to, as they have their own lenses through which they process the good guys and the bad guys. They favour the Brits in all metrics, based on years of data.

Think about, as a team, having to wait until you’ve conceded nine fouls in away games, close to half time, to even get a free-kick.

In the end, 3-3 was fairer as a result than 3-1, but the equaliser was a total fluke (as was Liverpool’s opener).

Villa – a good, fast and physical side, especially at home against the better teams – needed to push for at least a point and Liverpool did well considering the season is over, with just next week’s game left, and we’ll see what kind of special send-off is organised for Jürgen Klopp. I doubt it’ll include plastic flags, but I’d be happy to see 60,000 Klopp face masks.

The game did highlight some issues that Arne Slot will seek to fix in the summer (some of which may just fix themselves), that I’ll get onto, amidst the obvious good stuff.

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