Anfield has seen many legendary nights in the Champions League down the years, but last night won’t be one Liverpool want to remember for too long.
The 5-2 defeat to Real Madrid was arguably one of the worst, if not the absolute worst, performance of the Jürgen Klopp reign and left serious questions to be answered moving forward.
While defeat to the reigning champions may not be much of a surprise, it was the nature of the defeat that was the real concern given the Reds had been 2-0 up after just 14 minutes of the game.
It was a night in which numerous Liverpool stars were far from the level required, with big mistakes, poor errors of judgement and other issues all taken advantage of by a rampant Real Madrid in the second half.
That’s reflected in the ratings from the likes of AS and Marca today, who are not kind to Liverpool in any shape or form.
Marca say Mohamed Salah and Stefan Bajcetic were the Reds best performers, handing them two out of five each. In comparison, only Thibaut Courtois, Rodrygo and David Alaba, the latter who went off injured, got less than that for Real Madrid.
Everyone else in the Liverpool team gets a one, except for Joe Gomez, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Andy Robertson and Cody Gakpo whose performances didn’t warrant a score according to the newspaper.
It’s even more grim reading in AS, who are harsher with their scoring.
Their ratings see Salah as the only Liverpool player to get a two, with the rest on one or zero.
Alisson, Alexander-Arnold, Gomez and Jordan Henderson are all handed zeros, as are substitutes Joel Matip, Diogo Jota, Roberto Firmino and James Milner.
That may be a little hard on the subs but that’s how unimpressed the Spanish were, and only Courtois gets a zero for Madrid.
In fact, including the substitutes, eight of Liverpool’s team are handed zeros.
Whether Liverpool can recover some pride in the second leg remains to be seen but as these ratings show, the first leg was a debacle they’ll want to forget as quickly as possible.
