No Salah, no problem as Liverpool seal VAR-addled win without their fallen star | OneFootball

There was never a way that one game could wash away all the current unpleasantness and general circus vibe around Liverpool. But a hard-fought Champions League away win against last year’s runners-up had about as much going for it as could realistically have been hoped.

They did not miss the elephant outside the room. Mo Salah’s absence from the squad after his passionate/cynical/legacy-destroying (delete as appropriate) diatribe at Leeds was always going to be felt. It was impossible for that not to be the case.

But Liverpool played well enough without him this time, and the fact their winning goal was a late penalty won by a player earmarked as the new Anfield hero in Florian Wirtz and then so emphatically converted by Dominik Szoboszlai fed neatly into a convenient ‘Mo Who?’ narrative.

Sure, that’s reductive and not really particularly helpful to anyone, but for Arne Slot and his remaining Liverpool players it was the best that could come of it.

This was not a classic. It was a close and niggly game between two good but slightly chastened sides after setbacks on matchday five, but Liverpool were the more consistently inventive and for most of the game looked the likelier and more deserving winner, if a winner there would be.

The game hinged, as so many close games in Europe these days do, on a pair of highly contentious VAR calls. One went Liverpool’s way, the other didn’t. Our view, for what it’s worth? They were both wrong. The fact that in scoreline terms at least that does in the end out work out as two wrongs making a right shouldn’t change the sense of ‘what have we done to our game?’ old man yelling at clouds sense that we seem to get more and more now.

The entire concept of what is and isn’t handball has been bent right out of shape to serve the needs of VAR. That’s not new information, but it is still in our view the single most compelling argument against the unstoppable tide of technological takeover of football officiating.

We haven’t f*cked about with the idea of what is or isn’t handball to get a better or fairer law with superior outcomes; we’ve done it to make VAR’s life easier. But in a sane world VAR is supposed to serve the game, not the other way around.

If Hugo Ekitike truly did intentionally handle the ball a millisecond after Virgil van Dijk headed it at him, then he is quite simply superhuman and is wasting his life fiddling about with football when he could be catching bullets in his teeth in Vegas and/or saving the world.

If, as you might sense we suspect, he did not in fact intentionally handle the ball then what really are we even doing here?

It also took VAR about four minutes to come up with an answer that yes, it was handball. Perhaps it too was delayed by an existential crisis that mirrored our own.

We accept it might not feel like it, but we really do get bored of having to write about VAR and keep saying the same things. But it matters not just because of the decisions it makes but how it impacts the entire flow of games. It was an interminable delay at a time when the game was just getting up a head of steam.

Ibrahima Konate’s apparent opening goal came after the visitors’ best spell of the game to that point and appeared to rubberstamp their control.

The twin blows of the momentum-quashing delay and the goal being disallowed changed the whole vibe. Inter were much the better side for what was left of the first half.

VAR overturns are starting to feel like missed penalties; that sense that for the vibe of a game if not the scoreboard getting a penalty and missing it is far, far worse than never getting the penalty in the first place.

But at least missing a penalty is a natural part of the game and also kind of your own fault. Next time, just don’t miss it. None of that is true with VAR, which sealions its way into matches from the outside whether you like it or not.

To Liverpool’s credit they recovered themselves at the break and were the better side again in the second half.

Wirtz impressed after coming off the bench in another welcome tick for Arne Slot after what can only have been an awkward few days for him, but the penalty he won was firmly at the soft end of the Bristol Penalty Chart.

Yes, his shirt was pulled, but it didn’t impact him really. It certainly didn’t necessitate him throwing himself to the turf. We’re told that holding and pulling offences require consequence, and there was none here. We’re pretty sure both decisions go the other way nine times out of 10 in the Premier League.

There could be no argument with the overall outcome, though. Slot ends the night vindicated for his selection, tactics and in-game changes, as well as getting some extremely welcome rub of the green at the end there on a night where for the longest time it felt like that would definitely not be the case.

Slot’s side move on to 12 points to become near certainties for the top 24 and still very much live contenders for the top eight.