Well, that was quite an opening day. Newcastle 2-2 Liverpool, and I’m still not entirely sure how to feel about it twenty minutes after the final whistle. Part of me wants to be furious that we didn’t just win the game outright, given how much of the ball we had and how many chances we manufactured in patches. Another part of me is genuinely relieved we’re walking away from St James’ Park with anything at all, because for long stretches of that match we looked like the same soft, disorganised team that gave us so many headaches last season. A point on the road against a team like Newcastle, on the opening day of a new era, with a new manager in the dugout, is not nothing. But it also doesn’t feel like a point that should have needed rescuing in the ninth minute of stoppage time.
Let’s start with the obvious. Andoni Iraola’s first game in charge and we concede inside five minutes. Ryan Gravenberch, who I still think will be a really important player for us this season, gave the ball away in a dangerous area right on the edge of our own box, and Newcastle broke with the kind of pace and directness that has been their calling card under Iraola’s predecessor and, evidently, remains so now. Anthony Elanga did what Anthony Elanga does, got in behind Milos Kerkez far too easily, and finished coolly past Alisson. Five minutes into the season and we’re already chasing the game. If you’d told me before kickoff that we’d concede an early one at St James’ Park I wouldn’t have been shocked, this ground has a way of setting an early tone and the crowd feeds off it instantly, but the manner of it, a needless turnover in our own defensive third on matchday one, was the kind of thing that makes you wince rather than just shrug.
And here’s the thing that actually worries me more than the goal itself. Kerkez getting exposed by Elanga wasn’t a one-off. Newcastle spent the whole afternoon targeting that left back slot, and it never really stopped being a problem. Jeremie Frimpong on the other side didn’t have a much better time of it either, his usual quality going forward was almost entirely absent, and defensively both full backs looked like players still adjusting to a new system and a new set of instructions. I know it’s the first competitive match of the Iraola era and there’s going to be teething problems, that’s just football, but if I’m being honest, watching our back four get pulled apart by pace in behind felt uncomfortably familiar. We talked all summer about fixing the leaky defence from last season, about getting more control, more discipline out of possession, and for a solid hour of this game it looked like none of that had actually changed. Newcastle had 27 shots to our 13. Twenty seven. That is not a stat that speaks to a team in control of a match, that’s a stat that speaks to a team that got fortunate the final one didn’t cost them.
Alexander Isak’s return to St James’ Park was always going to be the storyline everyone circled on the calendar the moment the fixtures came out, and Newcastle’s crowd made absolutely sure he knew how they felt about it. Every touch he took was met with a wall of noise, and their players weren’t exactly shy about letting him know either, a few of those challenges on him in the first half were the kind that a few years ago would have had commentators shaking their heads about protecting your best players. To his credit, he stood up to it, he didn’t hide, he kept asking for the ball even when it wasn’t coming off for him. But if I’m being honest about his overall contribution, it wasn’t the homecoming performance we’d have scripted for him. Neither he nor Florian Wirtz really carved out the sort of clear-cut chances you’d want from your two headline attacking additions, and Newcastle’s defence, to their credit, did a solid job of nullifying that central threat for large periods. There’s no need to panic about it, it’s one match, but it’s worth being honest that our two most exciting attacking signings didn’t exactly announce themselves on the big stage today.
What I did like, and this is where I’ll try to be fair rather than just doom and gloom, was the response after going a goal down against the run of general expectation. We had more of the ball for most of the match, 61 percent possession by full time, and even though a lot of that possession was sterile and slow in the final third, there was a spell just after half time where we finally looked like a team that wanted to actually win the game rather than just survive it. Cody Gakpo curled an effort just over from the edge of the box early in the second half, a signal that he was starting to find pockets of space, and a couple of minutes later he did exactly what that first effort promised, absolutely rifling a shot from about twenty five yards into the bottom corner with the goalkeeper rooted to his line. It was a proper strike, the sort of moment that shifts the mood of an away end in an instant, and for about ninety seconds it felt like we’d turned the corner in the match.
Then, in the way this fixture seems to specialise in, the mood swung right back the other way almost immediately. Newcastle came straight back at us, Yoane Wissa doing brilliantly to shrug off multiple challenges and drive forward before laying it off to Joe Willock, who’d been on the pitch for all of about two minutes as a substitute. Willock curled a lovely finish into the far corner and just like that we were behind again, 2-1, barely sixty seconds after we’d drawn level. If there’s a more Liverpool moment than conceding to a substitute who’s touched the ball twice, immediately after we’ve just equalised, I don’t know what it is. It’s the sort of sucker punch that used to define our worst days last season, and for a good forty minutes after that goal I genuinely thought we were heading into the new campaign with an opening day defeat, and against a newly promoted level of expectation for Newcastle under Iraola’s opposite number no less, which would have made the post-match discourse absolutely brutal.
Credit where it’s due to the substitutes we brought on, because the introduction of some fresher legs did change the complexion of the closing stages. Lewis Koumas coming on for the final stretch injected some urgency, and it was that continued pressure, that refusal to just accept a defeat on day one, which eventually created the chance that mattered. Victor Munoz, only just introduced himself, got on the end of a ball into the box and was scythed down by Lewis Hall in what the referee, after a VAR check, decided was a clear penalty. Newcastle’s manager was fairly vocal about how soft he felt it was in his post-match reaction, and look, I understand why a manager on the losing end of a decision like that in the ninth minute of stoppage time is going to call it soft, that’s just what managers do. Watching it back, Hall does catch him, there is contact, but I can absolutely see the argument that on another day, with another referee, that stays uncalled. We’ll take it though, and I don’t feel the slightest bit guilty about that. Dominik Szoboszlai stepped up under about as much pressure as you can imagine, the away end behind the goal absolutely roaring, and buried it calmly into the corner. Ninety plus eight minutes. An almost cruelly late leveller for Newcastle to have to swallow, and an enormous sense of relief for us.
I want to talk about Szoboszlai for a second because his overall game today was a microcosm of our collective afternoon, some real quality mixed in with moments that just didn’t quite come off. He’d had a free kick in the first half that was drilled straight into the wall after being tugged back just outside the box, the kind of set piece delivery that on another day finds the top corner and changes the entire complexion of the match before half time. He worked hard, he was involved constantly, and then when the biggest moment of the match arrived, with everything on the line, he did not blink. That’s the mark of a genuinely important player, and it’s exactly the sort of composure we’re going to need from him if this new managerial project is going to get off the ground properly. Say what you want about the rest of the performance, that penalty took real nerve.
There were some nice touches around the edges of this fixture too that are worth mentioning, even in a blog post that’s mostly about frustration and relief. Both sets of players wore t-shirts before kickoff in tribute to Kevin Keegan, and the Newcastle end put together an enormous mosaic in the stands spelling out KEEGAN 7. It’s easy to get lost in the noise of a frantic, dramatic match and forget the context around it, but Keegan meant something to both of these clubs, genuinely, not in the watered down way that phrase sometimes gets used, and it was good to see that properly marked before a match that turned out to be as chaotic as this one. Football can be a small, petty world sometimes, all bad blood and rivalry, and it’s nice when both sets of supporters can put that aside for a minute to remember someone who mattered to the game itself.
On the debuts, because there were a few worth noting. Jeremy Jacquet got the nod at centre back in Iraola’s first team selection, which was a bit of a surprise to some given the other options on the bench, and I thought he acquitted himself reasonably well in a defence that had plenty of other problems that weren’t really his fault. He made at least one really important last-ditch intervention in the second half that gets completely lost in the noise of the two late goals but probably saved us a goal at a moment when the game could have gotten away from us completely. Ronald Araujo and Victor Munoz were among the substitutes, with Munoz obviously playing his part in the leveller, and it’s clear the manager isn’t afraid to throw new faces straight into the deep end, which I actually respect. There’s no easing in period being offered here, sink or swim from day one, and given how porous we looked at times, that trial by fire is probably exactly what these new arrivals need to go through sooner rather than later.
It was also strange, in a way that takes a second to fully process, seeing us start a season without any of Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mane, or Roberto Firmino on the pitch for the first time since 2015. That’s a genuinely enormous chunk of this club’s recent history that just isn’t part of the picture anymore, and watching Rio Ngumoha get the nod on the right wing in a team without a direct like for like replacement for Salah’s goal output was a reminder of just how much transition this squad and this club are going through simultaneously, on and off the pitch. New manager, new attacking talisman in Isak, a genuinely different system built around different principles, and now genuinely no direct connection left to that trophy laden Klopp front three. It’s a lot of change to digest in one off season, and maybe that goes some way to explaining why things looked so unsettled for such long periods of this game. These things take time to click, chemistry isn’t built in a single pre-season, no matter how much money gets spent or how many good individual signings get made.
So where does that leave us on reflection, sitting here after full time with a share of the spoils that felt like both a disappointment and a mild triumph depending on which twenty minute window of the match you were watching. Iraola’s post-match comments were honest, and I appreciated that about them. He talked about starting the worst way possible, about knowing Newcastle would come out fast in front of their own crowd on the opening day, about their pace in transition punishing us, and about the response, about not giving up at any point and valuing the energy the substitutes brought when it mattered most. That’s the right tone to strike after a game like this. You don’t want a new manager coming out and pretending everything was fine when it clearly wasn’t, defensively we were repeatedly cut open, but you also don’t want him throwing his players under the bus after they showed the character to come back twice in an away match against a team that fully deserved to be ahead for most of the afternoon.
There’s a version of this result that in three months’ time looks like a really important building block, a signal that whatever else goes wrong this group doesn’t stop competing until the whistle actually blows, that the substitutes bench has real quality in it, that Szoboszlai has ice in his veins when it matters. And there’s a version of this result that in three months’ time looks like the first data point in a worrying pattern, a defence that concedes soft early goals and gets bullied on the counter attack by quick wide forwards, full backs who get exploited repeatedly, and a front line of expensive new signings that took the entire match to really get going. Which version turns out to be true probably depends far more on what we see over the next five or six matches than on this single result. Opening day performances get overanalysed every single year, by every fan of every club, myself very much included, and the sensible thing to do is not draw sweeping conclusions from ninety plus nine minutes of one match, however dramatic those minutes turned out to be.
What I do know is that I’ll take a point away at St James’ Park on the opening day of a new managerial era, especially after being down 2-1 with the clock ticking into the tenth minute of stoppage time. I’ll take Gakpo looking sharp and dangerous in the second half. I’ll take Szoboszlai’s composure from the spot when the whole ground was screaming at him to miss. I’ll take the fact that this team, whatever its flaws today, clearly still has the fight in it to go and find an equaliser in the last kick of the game rather than just accepting a defeat. But I won’t pretend the alarm bells about our defending aren’t ringing, because they absolutely are, and if Kerkez and that back line get exposed like this against sides with real pace and quality in behind week after week, points are going to slip away far more often than they get rescued in the ninth minute of stoppage time. One down, thirty seven to go. Onwards, unbeaten, and hopefully a lot calmer than this one turned out to be LFC