Liverpool vs. Crystal Palace: *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

To me, Thursday, before the start of the match, felt like the needless breaking of the bond between club and fans, fans and players.

There could have been other ways to protest, and as I said before that game, it was likely to sabotage the atmosphere. And it did.

Whatever the justification for feeling aggrieved, it was utterly the wrong thing to do: to not fully back the team in the normal way. It just ends up with no one winning. And Liverpool losing. Great.

It also seems that it may have helped sabotage the season, sending the team into a slump; making Anfield nervous again, after years of Jürgen Klopp – so badly let down by the protest’s eery effect – making it a fortress. Stadium vibes are his forte. For so long the Kop have been brilliant, and this week it’s just been a brilliant own goal.

It seems he couldn’t believe a protest was taken into the stadium at such a vital point in the season, I’d assume, even if he understands the fans’ frustrations (and we can argue if a 2% rise was even worthy of a protest, but there were other ways to do it without harming the team. However, I was priced out over 20 years ago, so what do I know?).

The title race isn’t over, whatever anyone says.

But the Anfield fear factor was obliterated on Thursday, when fans visually withdrew their support, without thinking it through and what the second and third order effects would be. It took us back to 2021, when no fans were in the stadium, to be beaten twice in a row. Eery Anfield is not a good Anfield for Liverpool players.

Other forms of protest – boycotting buying shirts, or pints and pies, for example – could have made the point without creating a divide. But no. This is the age of fast-acting dramatic action via fermenting social media and WhatsApp groups, of memes and grabbing attention, and no one putting a brake on to say “hang on, let’s think about better ways to approach this”. It’s called cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Protests against an external force can unite; protests against your own club can divide.

Everyone should have the right to protest, and protests are a powerful weapon in any walk of life. The protests to oust Gillett and Hicks were utterly justified, and totally the right thing to do, at the right time.

But used badly, they can be self-defeating. No one has to pay for a ticket to Dublin, or travel, it seems, as things stand.

It didn’t make Liverpool players miss chances, but you need to be relaxed to take chances. Not to feel even more pressure. If you don’t have the best possible atmosphere you’re not helping the players.

You can hate FSG all you like (if only we had Everton’s owners?), but all it did was shit on Klopp’s parade, and break the feel-good factor.

And I’m not being wise after the event, as I said it all before the game on Thursday.

Klopp’s entire career has been about creating positivity in the stadium. That’s his main aim, always. That’s why he led the players to the fans after a 2-2 draw with West Brom. He got dog’s abuse for that, but it was clear what he was doing, to anyone with a brain. And it worked.

I was lucky enough to be at the Sheffield United game last week, and I said how amazing it was that Klopp had changed it from fans leaving ten minutes early to almost all staying back ten minutes after. As such, I saw the protests as a bad idea, whether or not you agreed with the intentions.

You can call that confirmation bias, or just understanding the precious nature of the atmosphere. Or do Liverpool normally lose games like this? What changed in the buildup to the unthinkable 3-0 defeat on Thursday and the unthinkable 1-0 defeat today?

A bubble has burst, that Klopp and the Kop, in tandem, had been blowing since ... well, since around the last time Palace won at Anfield. What had been a glorious farewell tour for Klopp, with an upping of the atmosphere, turned into a kind of civil war. Can that be regained to end the season with the league title, or will a kind of malaise now remain?

The players were edgy on Thursday, presumably, if actual human beings and not robots, spooked by the abnormal buildup and prematch routine (and no doubt aware of the rumblings about protests, and looking at banners of protest rather than the usual support), and then the confidence is broken. You’re in a negative spiral, from a positive cycle.

The damage was done before today. The vibe became a club divided. That was clear on Wednesday. Do something outside the ground, not inside.

That said, for all the nervousness and poor attempts at goal and edgy passing, this game hinged on five “misses” that weren’t really misses; four for Liverpool and one for Palace.

Alisson made one remarkable reaction save, and four times Liverpool hit shots that would normally have gone in, but for the same kind of interventions. However, most of these were late in the game, when the tension was already high.

The rest of my analysis and the analysis of the others follows for subscribers only.