In dismantling Galatasaray 4-0 at Anfield on Wednesday night, Liverpool laid to rest a statistical anomaly which had existed for no fewer than 17 years.
The Reds went into the match requiring a victory to stay in the Champions League after losing the first leg of their round-of-16 tie in Istanbul last week, and as Hugo Ekitike acknowledged, they could’ve won by an even greater margin in front of their home fans, such was their dominance.
In the days leading up to the game, Dominik Szoboszlai called for match-going LFC supporters to play their part in rallying behind the team, and those in attendance last night most certainly did their bit to help Arne Slot’s side.
Taking to X about an hour after the final whistle, Liverpool supporter and Sky Sports News assistant producer Ben Kelly relayed the kind of statistic which sounds made up but is actually true.
He correctly pointed out that it was the Reds’ first win at Anfield in a Champions League round-of-16 fixture since the 4-0 drubbing of Real Madrid in March 2009, which he described as a ‘weird quirk’ of LFC’s record in the tournament in the modern era.
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Considering that Liverpool have been a frequent presence in the competition over the past decade and have reached three finals in that time, it seems crazy to think that they hadn’t won at home at this stage of the tournament since Rio Ngumoha was just six months old.
However, you could now be forgiven for overlooking that the Reds went eight consecutive seasons without playing in the Champions League knockout rounds until meeting Porto in 2018, since which they’ve made it to at least the round of 16 on seven more occasions.
They did win the ‘home’ leg of their last-16 tie against RB Leipzig five years ago, although both legs of that match-up were played in Budapest due to travel restrictions between Germany and the UK arising from the global pandemic.
Liverpool went into last night’s match knowing that a continuation of that bizarre statistic would’ve resulted in elimination from Europe and compounded the feeling of misery at the club, but then came the kind of performance we’ve seen all too rarely this season.
Those standards will be needed for 180 minutes or more against reigning champions Paris Saint-Germain in the quarter-finals, but for all their maddening inconsistency in recent months, the Reds have shown they can rise to a big occasion and ought to respect but not fear Luis Enrique’s side.
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