Someone finally figured out how to keep Leicester City from scoring. Jurgen Klopp and Liverpool held the EPL league leaders to no goals for the first time this season in a 1-0 game. After Divock Origi had an apparent hamstring injury, Christian Benteke was subbed on and scored the game winning goal in the 63rd minute.
This game said a lot about both teams. Take Liverpool for example. They positively bounced back from their 3-0 thrashing by Watford. Even though the two players who were arguably most at fault for the Watford loss (Adam Bogdan and Martin Skrtel) weren’t playing, the team got it back together and beat the league leaders.
Even though Liverpool won, that didn’t mean they were all that great. Even though Christian Benteke scored the game winning goal, I have seen sloths make quicker decisions than Christian Benteke when he was on the ball in this game. Whether it’s an issue of nerves, overthinking or something else, Benteke seemed indecisive when he had more than a second with the ball. When he scored, he didn’t have time to think. Roberto Firmino crossed the ball to him and Benteke one touched the ball into the goal. But something like this…
Oh, and maybe ignore the fact that Benteke was incredibly offside. It didn’t seem like anybody noticed.
As far as Leicester City is concerned, they finally encountered a situation where a team gave them enough respect to change their gameplan to combat their game. Klopp made the changes to keep Leicester from employing their counter attack game and it worked for the most part. But that may not have been the only reason. EPL leading goalscorer Jamie Vardy was sick and was pulled after 69 minutes to keep him as healthy as possible for the Manchester City game on Tuesday. And pulling Shinji Okazaki and Riyad Mahrez, it looked like Leicester was giving the top players as much of a break as possible before Tuesday.
So because of Leicester subbing out their best players, this game slightly says more about Liverpool and their performance than Leicester City but you probably shouldn’t take much from Liverpool on the result either. In the end, it’s Boxing Day and Boxing Day provides some bizarre results. With Leicester having to play on Tuesday and Liverpool on Wednesday, neither team could afford to go all out and put out the regular starting XI for both games. When games are played this close, you’re going to see some shock results. This very well could be a trend but I highly doubt it. If Liverpool can keep Leicester City to another clean sheet in February, then we have something to talk about.
