Reflecting on Liverpool’s bizarre 2 games in 24 hours

Christmas television really is all repeats. On Tuesday night, Liverpool were on. On Wednesday night: oh, hey, Liverpool again. Boring.

Alright, so “boring” probably isn’t the word. “Weird” might be closer. Thanks to an almighty fixture pile-up, Liverpool ended up with a League Cup quarter-final against Aston Villa on Tuesday, then a Club World Cup semi-final against Monterrey the day after. The chosen solution didn’t, sadly, involve the first-team playing Villa, then making a breakneck Cannonball Run-style dash for Qatar.

Instead they sent the youth team to Birmingham, where they got beaten 5-0. For a while it was almost refreshing to watch: in a world where all football increasingly resembles an endless session of FIFA, the unfamiliar names gave proceedings an old-school Pro Evo feeling. But this was soon displaced by the inevitability of men against boys. Also Morgan Boyes, who scored an own goal. Poor lad.

Meanwhile, the grown-ups went off to Qatar, and for a moment it looked as if Liverpool were going to do to Monterrey what Villa had done to Liverpool Babies. Ten minutes into the game, Mohamed Salah slipped a beautiful through ball to Naby Keita, who stroked it home. A grand wave of futility swept across that portion of the world silly enough to be doing both games. Watch one foregone conclusion, shame on football. Watch two, shame on me.

But it turns out that Jordan Henderson isn’t quite a like for like replacement for Virgil Van Dijk, and Rogelio Funes Mori was able to nick an equaliser a few minutes later. In doing so he scored himself some lovely familial bragging rights: his twin brother, Ramiro, was sent off against Liverpool in 2016 for a miserable assault on Divock Origi.

Liverpool’s calculation was obvious. Forced to choose, they want the CWC; they weren’t bothered about the League Cup. But neither this statement of intent, nor Monterrey’s spirited refusal to lie down and wave their betters through, could hide the fact that the Club World Cup appears to exist in this shape, at this time, and in this place, for no purpose beyond the vanity of football’s administrators.

What is on paper a vaguely intriguing hypothetical — which continental champion is best? — collapses on contact with reality. Because the answer is always: Europe, unless they have a bad day. Even sometimes when they do. Monterrey were bold, brave, and great fun; Liverpool rolled out half their first team, laboured, then won the game thanks to a couple of overwhelmingly valuable substitutes.

Since the competition adopted this format in 2005, three South American teams have got the final, dug in, and earned themselves a 1-0 victory. The other finals have all gone to Europe.

This is not to mount some stalwart defence of the League Cup. Indeed, there’s a neat parallel between England’s third competition and... whatever the CWC is. The League Cup was added to the calendar in the early 1960s: not out of any great sporting demand, but because the schedule was being rejigged, the clubs were worried about losing revenue, and everybody wanted to show off their shiny new floodlights. We can play football in the evenings! Let’s play football in the evenings!

Fast forward five decades, and we have this strange lopsided competition, jammed into the middle of the European season. We can get all the champions together! Let’s get all the champions together! In Qatar! Obviously! Perhaps taking the competition to Qatar really will help to expand awareness of the game in checks notes the country that will host the next World Cup.

This is, perhaps, a hopelessly Eurocentric and deeply cynical view of this whole occasion. The fans are the most important thing, hopefully, and Flamengo’s fans are extremely activated by the prospect of meeting and defeating Liverpool.

That song’s about the 1981 Intercontinental Cup, in which Flamengo. captained by Zico, tonked the European champions 3-0. Clearly that was a hypothetical worth investigating.

But perhaps that game — a one-off, without the other confederations — also brings out the slant of this competition, and of football, as it is constituted now. Zico made his debut for Flamengo in 1971, and stayed with the club until 1983, when Udinese finally offered him enough money to leave.

On Saturday, Roberto Firmino will lead the line for Liverpool. He made his debut in Brazilian football in October 2009, and in December 2010, still a teenager, he moved to Germany. Europe defeats South America a long time before the teams meet on the field.

Back in Britain, Liverpool’s teenagers have, we hope, been taking the positives from their televised shellacking. Lots of encouraging possession, a word at half-time from Jurgen Klopp, a personal visit at full-time from John Terry. At the very least, they’ve laid the foundations for some Where Are They Now? pieces, a few years down the line. For their services to content, we thank them.

And for their services to helping Liverpool get on with things they actually care about, for reasons that aren’t immediately obvious, we’re sure Jurgen Klopp has a hug lined up. As soon as he gets back.