Despite Liverpool pulling off an amazing 3-2 win over Atletico Madrid on Tuesday night, a lot of the post-match reaction focused on midfielder Naby Keita, who was substituted at half-time. Keita scored Liverpool’s second goal with a wonderful volley, but he was at fault for the first Atletico goal and hardly covered himself in glory for the second either.
As such, a few post-match pieces, such as the one by James Pearce in The Athletic, focussed on Keita and the response on social media was mixed, to say the least.
Some fans felt that picking out Keita for criticism was unfair given how the whole team, bar the goalkeeper, underperformed after going 2-0 up, whilst others thought that the critique was more than fair.
On the latest episode of our Journo Insight Extra Show, Paul Machin asked Goal’s Neil Jones about Keita and the fallout of him being hooked at half-time
Neil said:
“I saw there was a lot of reaction to what some people wrote about Keita. I understand it because Liverpool won, it was a great win, and it does feel a bit churlish to be picking on a negative but it’s the manager who’s creating this. If Naby Keita plays 75 minutes in the game, it isn’t a discussion!”
Redmen Reacts
The negative reaction to some of the post-match critique of Keita was understandable. Liverpool won a big game in Europe and he was not the only player in a yellow shirt to look out of sorts. However, this wasn’t the first time that Keita has been hooked at half-time, in fact, it wasn’t even the first time he got hooked off at half-time in a game in Madrid!
Klopp has done this before and it’s obviously going to be a storyline for journalists to get stuck into if a player is subbed off at half-time. The controversy perhaps comes from the fact that it was Keita who was once again taken off, and not one of Jordan Henderson and James Milner, who were also very poor in the game but Neil is right; for Keita to not be a post-match talking point, he needs to perform to a level where Klopp isn’t even considering subbing him off at half-time.
TO HEAR MORE FROM NEIL JONES ON THIAGO, MO SALAH AND THE TRANSFER MARKET AS A WHOLE, CLICK HERE.
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