LIVERPOOL, England — Don’t be fooled by the narrow margin of the scoreline. Liverpool’s 2-0 victory over Villarreal at Anfield was the most one-sided semifinal you are likely to see and could and should have been so much more for the six-time European champions.
But 2-0 might well be more than enough to keep alive Liverpool’s dream of winning four major trophies in one season. Unai Emery’s team still has 90 minutes in next Tuesday’s second leg to salvage this tie and reach the Champions League final in Paris on May 28, but it would go against all logic and statistical evidence to believe that Liverpool will succumb to what seems an unthinkable Villarreal fightback.
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“It’s 2-0 at half-time [in the tie],” Jurgen Klopp said. “This is the best example of a score when you have to be completely on alert. We will have to be 100 percent in the right mood and play the second leg in exactly the same way we played the first. The score is fine, but we are not through.”
This competition has certainly given us plenty of remarkable second legs in recent years, including Liverpool overturning a 3-0 deficit against Barcelona to win 4-0 in the return fixture. If Villarreal are able to eliminate Klopp’s team at Estadio de la Ceramica, it will be in the same league of shocks as that unforgettable night at Anfield in May 2019.
But Liverpool’s failure to translate their dominance into a winning margin more reflective of the game means that Villarreal, last season’s Europa League winners, still have a glimmer of hope in the second leg. The “Yellow Submarine” have ended the European ambitions of Arsenal, Manchester United, Juventus and Bayern Munich over the past 12 months, so Liverpool will not take them lightly, but the reason Klopp’s side was so in command during the first leg was precisely because Liverpool did not underestimate Villarreal.
Juventus and Bayern both failed to recognise the danger of Villarreal…
Source : espn
