After the Lucas/Essien thousand-point pinball goal, I thought, “There’s no chance Chelsea will concede three in ten minutes, is there?”
Then I thought, “Well, it’s been known to happen.”
Then Riera crossed for Kuyt to make it 4-3.
By the end of this game, Tommy Smyth was openly admitting that he no longer understood what the aggregate score was or how to calculate the scenarios for advancement, and even with the stipulation that we’re not talking about an announcer whom most soccer fans would credit with extreme mathematical perspicacity, it was a telling comment. Matches don’t tend to bewilder the commentators with possibility unless something reasonably special is happening.
It was full of weird symmetries. There were two shocking goalkeeping errors and two brilliant free kicks, split evenly between the teams and on either side of halftime. Both teams were missing their captains. Both teams had star attacking players—I mean Kalou and Torres—who failed to make an impact on the match. Every time Kuyt bungled an easy header, it seemed as though Ballack would bungle an easy shot. And yet both teams took seemingly insurmountable leads and made seemingly impossible comebacks. It wasn’t quite like watching shadowboxing, because the thing wasn’t synchronized to its reflection; it was like reading some brutally well-constructed story about how the wheel of fortune upends the lives of twins. Every triumphant action contained the impetus of its own reversal.
It was never, for all that, the sort of match that makes your heart just fly, maybe because the rhythm was so choppy (the referee was a literalist), maybe because the defending was halfhearted at times, maybe because luck played such a role in three of Liverpool’s goals (the Čech shocker, the soft penalty, the angle of Essien’s shoulder). It was more abstract and cosmic than epic, like listening to the subject of a fugue disconnect from itself and sail toward some distant resolution. It was exhilarating rather than visceral; there was something almost intellectual about it, though I’m sure fans of either team will have had a different experience.
In the end I thought Chelsea deserved to advance, on the strength of this game as well as their performance last week. When the symmetry finally broke, it broke in their favor, and they did what Liverpool didn’t: they scored a goal that lifted clear of the jumble of play and crystallized a moment of intention. I mean Lampard’s last, obviously, that clean curl into the top corner. It wasn’t an immortally great goal, but it was a moment of beautiful football in a match that up till then had offered everything but that.
The aggregate scoreline says that Chelsea won by two goals, but everyone who saw the game will remember that they won by an inch and an ounce. Until almost the very end of the match, every possibility you could think of seemed just about equally alive, amazing, and plausible. That was more salient than the scoreline, and that’s what ought to last.
Read More: Champions League, Chelsea, Liverpool, The Occasional Match Summary
by Brian Phillips · April 14, 2009
Just picking up the thread of the comments in the halftime post, nothing the referee did annoyed me more than his timing of Drogba’s fake injuries in stoppage time. There were three minutes of time added, then Drogba rolled around on the pitch for about a minute and half, and so the referee decided to blow the whistle at 3:30. It was probably over by that point, but who knows? More importantly, what motivation do players have not to feign injury in a situation like that if they obviously gain a defensive benefit from doing so?
Yeah, the injury time subsitutions and divings are quite annoying, although in a non-Drogba player’s defense, they do get tired and more injury prone near the end of the game
Is it just me, or does Liverpool play better without Gerrard? I know that comment will get me in hot water with some folks, but the squad looks more balanced with Benayoun pulling the strings
Two things:
(a) Given that the aim of most football teams is to smother chaos, it’s always most pleasant to see a game as unhinged as this;
(b) Petr Cech — was he ever truly as wonderful as he was made out to be? Was he not flattered in his early Chelsea career by playing behind one of the great English league defences of recent times? His performance today was hardly unique for him in the last few seasons. Does his decline date from the Stephen Hunt incident or is it a consequence of not being as well-protected as he was when Mourinho was in charge?
Good question.
Cech was good, obviously, but I never could stomach the idea of him being on the level of messieurs Buffon and Casillas.
I also think the whole pointing everything back to the head injury and making sense of why he’s so bad right now had a very distinct scent of post hoc ergo propter hoc over it. I’m with Freddorarci’s second explanation.
I completely agree about the “intellectual” comment…there was moments for me that were as emotionally disorganized as it gets, but I’m still not convinced of the epic-ness of this match. The result and scoreline scream epic, but I experienced it very differently. Of course if Liverpool had scraped another one instead of Chelsea I’d be screaming about how epic the result was.
Elliott, It’s just you.
See: Fernando Torres, the best number 9 in the world, only when he’s got a striking partner in Gerrard who can read his intention from a look.
See Fernando Torres thriving because Gerrard understands how to involve him enough and in ways so that he begins to become an unbalancing disruptive force as much as a traditional number 9.
See Gerrard and Torres, playing the best two-man game in the world.
See Gerrard, willing the ball into the back of the net from thirty-five yards out in the 93rd minute, and notice that you’re not surprised. You’re only amazed that he’s done it once again.
I’ll wager that Gerrard goes into surgery for his groin the day after Liverpool win the title. Oh, it’s happening.
“Until almost the very end of the match, every possibility you could think of seemed just about equally alive, amazing, and plausible. That was more salient than the scoreline, and it’s what everyone who watched this match will remember.”
Could not agree more. I watched it after work and already knew the final, but even then I got the feeling that Liverpool could have won, like this match was happening in some kind of alternate universe where everyone wears hats on their feet and hamburgers eat people.