Liverpool, Isak and Wirtz find their ideal opponent as West Ham lay out the welcome mat | OneFootball

Sometimes all you really need is a nice, quiet, comfortable time.

Liverpool have been a team in urgent need of quiet and comfort for some time now, and against the most hospitable of hosts in West Ham, they got all they could have asked for.

With the only real signs of aggression from West Ham aimed at the referee by Lucas Paqueta, who ludicrously talked himself into a pair of bookings for dissent in the space of 90 seconds of extreme and total headloss, Liverpool were able to collect three points with about as little fuss as could ever happen in a game where you don’t open a two-goal lead until injury time.

In normal times, it would have been distinctly forgettable. Just a routine win over a clearly inferior team who set themselves up to avoid humiliation and just about achieved that but precisely nothing more.

These, though, have not been normal times for Liverpool and that makes this potentially far more significant than might usually be the case.

When you’ve been beaten by three clear goals in three straight games, there is no such thing as a routine win. But West Ham did their very, very best to disprove it.

Arne Slot’s big pre-match decision was to bench Mo Salah, and the resulting sight of both Alexander Isak and Florian Wirtz having their best Premier League games for Liverpool is certain to raise a few eyebrows.

We should be grateful, because it provided talking points that, until Isak’s goal and Paqueta’s ridiculousness – if we had his history, we would simply not talk ourselves into an inevitable red card for no reason – were in desperately short supply.

Isak’s goal is probably the most significant moment outside the specific welcomeness of the three points. It was far more Newcastle Isak than anything we’ve seen of him at his new club up to now, an instinctive, clever and precise first-time finish inside Alphonse Areola’s near post.

In a game that felt built for cliches – with its training-ground feel, and encouraging glimpses from players whose hefty transfer fees were hardly their fault – the hope must be that this goal will burst the dam and open the floodgates and other water-based metaphors for Isak.

It was his third of three increasingly encouraging efforts on goal, the first ballooned cartoonishly over the bar, the second was well saved by Areola and the third brought that desperately needed goal.

Yet just how much this all means for Liverpool’s wider hopes of recovery of some sort this season is just so hard to gauge when West Ham were just so poor. They were, given Liverpool’s much-publicised troubles, inexplicably passive throughout and seemingly eyeing a goalless draw that was always a long shot even against this iteration of Liverpool.

Given their own recent, if tentative recovery, we expected more. Instead, it was really only when down to 10 men in the closing minutes that we saw any sign of any real intent from Nuno Espirito Santo’s side.

Cody Gakpo thumped home a clincher to render any remote chance of West Ham pinching a point they didn’t deserve moot, and seal victory.