Newcastle 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

That really was one of the great wins - petro-doped, sportwashing persistent-foulers, aided by an utter buffoon of a ref, beaten in the their own frothing backyard when playing about 75 minutes against 10 men, and choking on the fumes of their own oily hype. How's that for your fake tan, puffed-up side-kick man?

Wataru Endo must think Liverpool are only allowed to play with ten men.

(He must also wonder what they're smoking at the PGMOL. This might explain some of it.)

Thankfully, several in red played like two men, and Darwin Núñez finally finished with the consistency his first touch may never match.

The red card for Virgil van Dijk was ludicrous, but that's what you get when your manager upsets weak-willed officials.

Gary Lineker tweeted that he thought van Dijk actually won the ball; but even if it was a foul, it was natural contact from a foul where two boots met, and not denying a goalscoring opportunity with anything meaningful – just as Alexis Mac Allister's red card last week was barely a yellow.

To play against the three officials and the two at Stockley Park each week is ludicrous, but while the Reds are winning, it just feels even sweeter.

Similarly, the booking for Trent Alexander-Arnold for being barged into the advertising hoardings and then knocking the ball was pathetic. The same ref who thought this was only a yellow card, and who allowed Joelinton to kick everyone all afternoon.

Refs are cracking down on the technocrat stuff and getting worse on everything else. To book someone for the merest movement of the ball and to then only give a yellow for something like this shows how far from reality they've drifted:

Again, the same for that as for not even properly kicking the ball away a couple of yards. It’s madness. It’s absolute madness. It’s officiating by numbers, done with the IQ of a dead squid that’s been eaten and shat out in shards by an especially dim shark.

And yet to have two wins and a draw when going to Chelsea and Newcastle in the first three games, and playing over 90 minutes of the three games with 10 men, is sensational.

After a bright start before the clamour to have Alexander-Arnold sent off after just five minutes, the play was bitty; but in the final 30 minutes the Reds played Newcastle off the park.

It felt for most of the game like a defeat was inevitable, and to draw would have felt miraculous; to win, astonishing.

And to do so with a brand new midfield that had to yet again play with a man down, and then to rely on a 20-year-old centre-back making his debut (to partner the 4th choice) to bolster the ranks at the back, adds lovely black-and-white icing to the cake.

This is something I'll savour, with lots of praise to hand out. (My further ranting about officials can wait until another day.)

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