The Champions League match against Liverpool was bittersweet for Xabi Alonso, who returned to Anfield as manager of Bayer Leverkusen, who last season pulled off a near miracle to win the Bundesliga without defeat.
The German champions played their own football in hostile territory in the first half, but as usual, Liverpool corrected and shifted gears in the second half and held on for a comfortable 4-0 win, with a hat-trick from Colombian international Luis Diaz and a goal from Dutch international Cody Gacupo.
With this victory, they moved to the top of the Champions League table, while mega clubs such as Real Madrid and Manchester City were defeated. The Spanish coach, who led the Bundesliga champions to their first away defeat in a long time, admitted that his opponents deserved the win, but reflected on the game, saying that the first half was good.
“For sure, the second half compared to the first half wasn’t good enough,”
“First 45 minutes we competed really well and played well.”
“We were able to have good possession and maybe not that many chances, but intense in defence and have good organisation.”
“Second half we started not having the ball in such good positions, we couldn’t find the free player so they were recovering the ball too easily. Because of that we weren’t able to hold the intensity.”
“We dropped a little bit our tempo and the first goal is a consequence of that, they played the ball through too easily, we weren’t squeezing the line quickly enough and the second one two minutes later, it was tough.”
“We weren’t able to recover from that. We weren’t able to hold it to 1-0 longer, if we could have done that for 15-20 minutes it would have been better but 2-0 made it much harder.”
“Caoimhin Kelleher made great saves and with open spaces they scored two more goals. To lose 4-0 is a hard result, harder (to take) than the performance but it is what it is. This is the Champions League at Anfield against one of the best teams.”