As with previous triumphs, Liverpool’s Champions League final win saw them suffer and fight. But, having beaten Tottenham, they can grow further.
MADRID — And now, after a 2-0 win against Tottenham Hotspur, it is six European Cups for Liverpool. With Barcelona and Bayern Munich left behind, ahead — just one away — are Milan and then 13-time winners Real Madrid, who have owned the European Cup competition like few others. No club can be separated from its past but Liverpool, more than most, are marked by what came before, from the sublime to the tragic.
The latest title mirrored those that came before in the sense that it was gutted out and filled with might-have-beens, probably many more than there should have been. That has been the story of Liverpool’s European wins: twice on penalties, twice by a single goal, always with the game in the balance until the final minutes.
So maybe it was apt that at the final whistle, when most of the newly crowned champions of Europe collapsed to the Wanda Metropolitano pitch, felled by equal parts exhaustion, elation and the need for release, the last to get up was Jordan Henderson.
The Liverpool captain stayed down for what felt like an eternity, first with head in hands, then hunched on all fours. Only when substitute Divock Origi put the match out of reach, with three minutes to go, could Liverpool shake a creeping fear that an final marked by errors and fatigue could take a twist against them.
There, for much of the second half, when Tottenham shook off the torpor and finally realized that if they were going to go down, it could not possibly be with the sort of flaccid whimper that characterized the opening 45 minutes, was Henderson. Arms flailing, legs pumping, orders barking.
He was not flawless, nor decisive, but he was the realization made flesh that a season’s work — heck, four years’ work — could be undone by a single, cruel moment. And in his ability to suffer, to fear and to excrete energy from every cell in his body, lay the key to Liverpool weathering Tottenham’s late revival.
This was not the Liverpool side we had seen for much of the season, but it was the Liverpool side that needed to show up in order to win the European Cup, one year after losing in the final to Real Madrid.
« It was a big challenge for both teams, after three weeks without a competitive game, with the heat, it turned into a fight, » manager Jurgen Klopp said later. « Usually, I’d be sitting here to explain why we had played so well and lost. It’s nice not to do that. »
The Wanda Metropolitano is a concrete bowl, surrounded by lanes of expressways, that still feels unfinished nearly two years after its opening.
