Goals Galore - A New Club Record
Part one of this incredibly enjoyable chapter from This Red Planet
With the new Premier League season about to start and the Reds having such an amazing array of attacking talent (have we ever had a more disparate and potentially lethal range of options?) why not enjoy this chapter about a record breaking volume of goals in our ever-so-close-to-perfection season described in This Red Planet by Paul Tomkins. Only available to subscribers (along with the other chapters published on TRP).
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A record-breaking season of goals – 147, to mirror the maximum break in snooker (which also involves a lot of reds) – started at Norwich, first game, after just 25 minutes: a back-to-front move that saw Virgil van Dijk, after winning possession, lay the ball to James Milner, who pinged the ball out to the far side, and Trent Alexander-Arnold. His low pass-cum-cross into the box was miscontrolled by Mo Salah, but, in the first of his many assists (this one inadvertent), it fell straight to an alert Diogo Jota, who swept the ball under the keeper. Salah then assisted Roberto Firmino for the second, and the game was won when, lurking on the edge of a packed box at a corner – at which Liverpool’s giants were being blocked and man-handled – the Egyptian opened his own account as the ball fell to him, and he curled it towards the top corner.
It was fitting that Jota scored the opening goal. Although his season petered out, Jota was by far the top scorer of the Reds’ vital opening goals in games: ten, to six from Sadio Mané and five from Mo Salah. Next came Ibrahima Konaté of all people, with three; tied with Taki Minamino, albeit the Japanese’s goals were in lesser competitions, bar the vital strike in league game 37 which took the title race to the final day. In terms of scoring the ‘winner’ (the last goal in a one-goal victory), Mané did so four times, with Salah and Divock Origi on two apiece. (Origi got a two-for at Wolves, when his injury time opener was also the winner.)
In a fast start to the season, Jota and Mané added two more in the next game, at home to Burnley, whilst a Salah penalty rescued a point at home to Chelsea in the third match, as the Reds sat third on goal difference, with Manchester United top, also with seven points.
In all competitions, the first sixteen games saw 12 wins, four draws and, perhaps not required for the mathematically minded amongst you, no defeats. By the time the Reds travelled to West Ham in early November, they had scored 42 goals. They added two more that day, but the team balance in that initial third of the season was not quite right, with opponents allowed numerous good chances; conceding three goals to David Moyes’ team, to suffer a defeat, and shipping two or more goals against AC Milan (eventual Italian champions), Brentford, Manchester City (understandable), Atlético Madrid (also understandable), and Brighton – a draw from a 2-0 advantage, where, back for a game in my old season ticket seat, I saw Mané make it 3-0 and the huge sigh of ‘this is done’ to fill the stadium, only for VAR to chalk it off (rightly so, on replays), and for the whole stadium to deflate. West Ham, Brighton and Brentford scored a total of eight against the Reds in those three games.