Liverpool, with braces from Cody Gakpo, Darwin Nunez and Mohamed Salah, scored their biggest victory against Manchester United (7-0) on Sunday in the 26th day of the Premier League, confirming their return to the race for the League champions.
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The Reds’ previous record for a victory over their biggest rival in English football was a 5-0 win dating back to 1925. The Red Devils had not suffered such humiliation since Boxing Day 1931 and the 7-0 win over Wolverhampton.
With this triumph, Liverpool take 5th place in Newcastle with 42 points against 41, even if the Magpies have one game less. They also come back three lengths from Tottenham, 4th and last virtual qualifier for the C1, but who played one more match.
With 49 points and the same number of matches as Liverpool, United remains firmly in 3rd place, but he sees the leading tandem, consisting of Arsenal (63 pts) and Manchester City (58th), moving away.
It’s a real blow for the men of Erik ten Hag who remained on eleven matches without defeats and who completely sank in the second half after having nevertheless done better than equal play for 40 minutes.
Manchester United knockout standing
Bruno Fernandes, from the head (26th), and Marcus Rashford, on receiving a very nice opening from Luke Shaw (27th), even had two interesting opportunities.
But the Reds were ruthless, opening the scoring just before the break with a goal that was as perfect in execution as it was clean in design.
In two passes of more than 30 meters, from Alisson for Andrew Robertson and from Robertson, in the hole, for Cody Gakpo, the Dutchman found himself in the opposing box to hook outwards and avoid the return of Raphaël Varane , before chaining an inside of the foot in the opposite side netting which left David de Gea without reaction (1-0, 43rd).
Comforted by this successful end to the first act, the Reds again took Manchester by the throat on the way back from the locker room and after a somewhat confused action, Harvey Elliott’s tense cross in the box was taken over with a nice reflex of the head by Darwin Nunez for the 2-0 (47th).
Three minutes later, Gakpo launched a counter-flash by shifting Mohamed Salah on the right, before the Egyptian temporized just enough to find the Dutchman who, with a shot from a tight angle, widened the gap again (3-0, 50th), putting Manchester KO standing.
New record for Salah
On a day when everything smiled on them, Salah added a fourth goal with an instinctive strike under the bar from the right corner of De Gea, after a ball returned in his race by Scott McTominay (4-0, 66th) .
He also scored twice by recovering a ball that was still lying around in the box to score from close range (6-0, 83rd), thus becoming, with 129 league goals, Liverpool’s best scorer in the Premier League ahead of Robbie Fowler.
Meanwhile, Nunez had also offered himself a double, with a very nice deflection of the overturned head (5-0, 75th), while Roberto Firmino, announced on departure, added a seventh goal in the 88th, nine minutes after coming on.
This seventh game in a row without losing against Manchester United at Anfield – the longest series since the 1970s – could sign the real return to the fore of the Reds after months of trial and error.
Jürgen Klopp also becomes the Liverpool coach to have most often beaten the Red Devils in the league with this 6th success in 16 confrontations, ahead of Gérard Houllier (5).