A re-run of the last final of the European Champions League only nine months after the event feels a little too soon. Or at least it does to the head coaches involved in Real Madrid versus Liverpool.
Carlo Ancelotti and Jurgen Klopp's experience of finals in this competition surpasses that of any other manager in this season’s last-16 phase. One of them must leave this European Cup prematurely.
If Liverpool are eliminated, a gloom will be cast over their season, an extra urgency injected into the salvaging of a domestic campaign that stuttered badly either side of a World Cup disruptive to most elite clubs but perhaps especially to the Merseysiders.
Their style of football feeds on gathering momentum and an intense rhythm. Interrupt those and the Liverpool method is put at risk.
The mood, though, is much improved at Anfield from 10 days ago, when an exit from the FA Cup, and a run of four Premier League matches yielding just one point were being digested. Everton have since been beaten at Anfield and a stubborn Newcastle United overcome at the weekend.
“We looked a lot more like a team again,” said Klopp, “but we still need results.”
Liverpool remain eighth in a league where last season they were still chasing top spot on the last afternoon.
The gap to the top four is seven points, and even if Liverpool have matches in hand on fourth-placed Tottenham Hotspur, there is a strong argument that the challenge of qualifying for next season’s Champions League looks as easily met by winning the current edition as by finishing in the top four of a fiercely competitive Premier League.
Under Klopp, after all, Liverpool have made reaching Champions League finals almost an expectation. They have featured in three of the last five. And in three of the last five seasons it has been Madrid who thwarted the European dream, twice in finals – 2018 and 2022 – and in 2020-21 when, thanks in part to an inspired Vinicius Junior, then just 20 years old, the Spanish team triumphed in the quarters.
An impressively matured Vinicius struck the winning goal in Paris last May to deliver Madrid’s 14th European Cup.
Newcastle v Liverpool player ratings
Tonight, for the third time in as many seasons, Vinicius and his jousts with Trent Alexander-Arnold are again a natural focus, a duel of prodigies with a storied hinterland of battles against one another.
Most of them were taken as a measure of how far Liverpool’s gifted attacking right-back has – or has not – broadened his game as a man-marker, or grown more mindful of his positioning; or of how much Vinicius had added precision in the final pass or shot to his searing speed and dribbling.
“He’s a world-class player,” said Klopp of Vinicius, “and not to be left in one-on-one situations. You try to deny him passes but the problem we have is if you can defend Vinicius properly, then there’s Benzema or Rodrygo or whoever. There’s Modric – world-class players. You have to defend against them collectively.
“We can’t play this game without respect for Real Madrid, they are absolutely world-class. It’s a well set-up team and I don’t think you can make them panic. They are always super, super competitive.”
Klopp acknowledged that only at the weekend, preparing for the latest instalment of his Liverpool-Madrid odyssey, did he re-watch the Paris final for the first time, replaying the series of Thibaut Courtois saves that would be as important to the outcome as Vinicius stealing away from Alexander-Arnold to score from Fede Valverde’s pass.
“Now I know why I didn’t watch it again,” smiled Klopp. “The chances we had! The saves they had to make! What held us back a little was that it was a final. We weren’t adventurous enough.”
Lessons had been learnt, Klopp believes. Man-for-man, a distinct Liverpool from last May's will seek to adjust the recent win-loss balance of contests between the two clubs.
Cody Gakpo, the winter signing, fresh from his first Premier League goals against Everton and Newcastle, should make his European debut for his new club. Darwin Nunez, last summer’s major recruit, is hoping to overcome shoulder pain enough to take part. “There is a chance,” reported Klopp of the Uruguayan striker.
As for Madrid, the weariness from a packed calendar, with its extra tournaments for European Cup holders, plus a winter World Cup to which 13 of their players were called up, is having an effect.
Their chief summer addition, France’s Aurelien Tchouameni, has not travelled to Merseyside because of illness. Likewise Toni Kroos. Benzema, who missed the weekend win at Osasuna, is a doubt for the starting XI. Once again, Ancelotti must look to Vinicius to carry a big load.
Real Madrid train at Anfield
