the times | Thursday April 28 2022 2GM 69
Sport
Busy final week for Liverpool
Liverpool will play twice in the final
week of the Premier League season
after their trip to Southampton was
rearranged for Tuesday, May 17 —
three days after their FA Cup final
against Chelsea and five days before
the season finale (Paul Joyce writes).
It means that Manchester City
could boast a four-point advantage
at the top when Liverpool kick off at
St Mary’s, providing they continue
to win. Liverpool’s last match of the
season is against Wolverhampton
Wanderers; City host Aston Villa.T
he last time that Étienne
Capoue was playing regular
football in England it was
with Watford in the Sky Bet
Championship. His final
game was at Vicarage Road, against
Norwich City; his team won 1-0 and
he picked up a yellow card.
Yesterday evening he was back
here at Anfield in rather different
circumstances, and he might have felt
out of place in a Champions League
semi-final were he not surrounded by
an assortment of similar has-beens
and cast-offs from English football.
It probably helped, too, that a
corner of Anfield was very loud and
very yellow. Villarreal is a small town
near Valencia that is about half the
size of Gloucester, and about half of
its population, it seemed, had
followed the team here.
When this first leg was done last
night and Villarreal had, in effect,
held on to a 2-0 deficit, the players
went to the yellow corner, saluted
their followers, and their yellow
masses duly saluted them back. This
is one hell of an adventure.
It is also a story about breaking the
mould, about breaking into the elite.
Villarreal are the most romantic of
stories, yet a team playing the least
romantic version of the game. You
want to play with the elite of Europe?
The last thing you do is try to ape the
way they play the game.
While Villarreal are still standing,
though, they remain more than a
football team — they are a statement
about what is still possible. Anfield,
last night, was a celebration of
football’s democracy, and Villarreal
are the proof that it can still just
about work. Had the Super League
gone ahead, the story of their
extraordinary uprising against the
upper class of the European game
this season would not have got
beyond the first sentence, and there
would never have been that noisy
yellow spectacle.
Here, against the might of
Liverpool, were a small-town club
with a manager, laughed out of the
Premier League, who has pulled
together a band of misfits. They have
arrived in these semi-finals, along
with Liverpool, Manchester City and
Real Madrid, very much the odd ones
out: small, unfashionable, brilliantly
upsetting the established order.
On their journey to this stage
they have taken out first Juventus and
then Bayern Munich. That is serious
roadkill. It is also an odyssey that, a
year ago, the European elite — of
which Liverpool were a key player —
were seeking to eradicate from the
realms of possibility.sparks Liverpool into life
Romance in short
supply as Emery
goes safety-first
Liverpool fans didn’t think much of
that plan, which perhaps explains the
warmth of the welcome accorded the
visiting side. Not that it lasted long.
Whatever the Kop may think of
Villarreal’s story, it wasn’t reflected in
approval for their football. The magic
of their run to the last four was not
fashioned with a similar brilliance on
the pitch.
Yet that is the achievement that
Unai Emery has worked with them.
He hasn’t attempted to beat the
leaders of Europe at their own game;
instead he has taken pragmatism to
an extreme where it can challenge
them. No pretence, no delusions of
grandeur. If these were players to set
Europe alight with their creativity,
they would have been doing so at one
of the clubs they have confounded
throughout this competition.
They know their game, and much
of it is about prevention. It is about
sitting back, soaking up, being bloody
awkward. Emery is the master of
training an underdog. Here they
followed instructions to the letter.
Not that Liverpool will have
expected anything different. This is
exactly what Villarreal have been
doing on their march through Europe:
they have become experts in making
life difficult, getting numbers behind
the ball, being disciplined, hard to
break down. It is the kind of thing
against which Liverpool had 90
minutes’ practice against Everton
on Sunday, just a considerably
tougher proposition.
Thus, quickly established as the
most unpopular man at Anfield
was Gerónimo Rulli, the Villarreal
goalkeeper. His first goal kick took an
age. His second was no quicker. And
the Polish referee didn’t seem to care
much. A pattern was set. The Kop was
disgusted. To Villarreal, this was a
kind of applause.
You come to unsettle Liverpool
here at home, you try to play at your
own pace and take them on the break.
Frustrate and confound; for so long it
was working.
Francis Coquelin — once of
Arsenal — pulled down Trent
Alexander-Arnold on the edge of
the 18-yard area. Giovani Lo Celso —
on loan from Tottenham Hotspur —
feigned a blow to the head and ran
down a few more seconds. Capoue
filled the space in front of the
Villarreal back four and foiled
Liverpool’s attempts to penetrate the
wall behind him.
Yet Liverpool never showed any
signs of self-doubt. They worked their
half-chances in the first half and
finally finished them in the second.
So here is the difficulty for
Villarreal. They now need to chase
the game. They can no longer
confound and frustrate. The
pragmatism that got them to the
semi-final needs to change.
“I want you to see,” Emery said
afterwards, “that we can take the
game to them” — which would be a
final twist to this most unlikely,
uplifting football story.Villarreal have shown
smaller clubs can thrive
among the elite but
must be bolder next
week, writes Owen Slot
CARL RECINE/ACTION IMAGES/REUTERS; ANDREW POWELL/LIVERPOOL FC/GETTY IMAGESminutes in this kind of game, when
will you? Our intensity has been
high in the last couple of games. We
have had a hectic schedule but we are
enjoying it. There is still work to do, but
we are happy.”
Villarreal will have to cast off their
cloak of caution on home soil to
overturn the deficit, but their head
coach, Unai Emery, the former Arsenal
manager, vowed to play differently.
“They were better than us. They have
been better over the 90 minutes,” he
said. “We want to play a better game
and create better chances ourselves,
but we needed to be on the defensive a
lot. We wanted to avoid that heavy
pressure, gain a few metres and go away
from our own goal, but we didn’t do that
as we liked.
“The result could have been a worse
hill to climb — 2-0 still gives a chance to
have a different game at home.
“We wanted to win, we weren’t able
to. We wanted to draw, we weren’t able
to. We are still alive.
“The result isn’t bad considering we
were below par. Liverpool have not felt
any threat from us today. We have not
made them suffer.
“I want to see that we can take the
game to them and we are capable of
giving them a game.
“I have to be optimistic that next
week we can create danger for them.
This is a big step up from Juve and a big
step up from Bayern Munich.”Thiago in control
Direction of playThiago was outstanding again in
Liverpool's midfield, orchestrating
their play from all over the pitch.