Loris Karius was to be denied the opportunity to show he could heed the waspish advice on offer from his tormentors. Instead, as he sat sour-faced on the substitutes’ bench, Liverpool hit back on his behalf.
This was the “shut up and do your job” kind of performance that Jamie Carragher and the Neville brothers had spoken about, a display that owed everything to patience before Jürgen Klopp watched his players cut free and rip Middlesbrough to shreds to move back into second in the Premier League.
Liverpool’s second goal on the hour sealed this success and served as a tribute to trigonometry. The rat-a-tat-tat of one-touch passing was a sheer delight as the ball zipped around in a blur: Sadio Mané to Nathaniel Clyne and then back to Mané, who swapped passes with Georginio Wijnaldum not once, but twice, before the Dutchman released the marauding Adam Lallana. His pass was tucked away by Divock Origi, the Belgian scoring his fifth goal in as many games.
The Riverside is supposed to be a bogey ground for Liverpool, their previous win here having come in 2002, but last night the hoodoo was emphatically lifted. By the end, the focus had shifted from Klopp’s decision to reintroduce Simon Mignolet for Karius — after the latter’s costly aberrations against Bournemouth and West Ham United — and back on to his players’ rampant instincts, which made light of a recent dip in form.
Karius’s demotion is indefinite and, on this evidence, there will no quick route back into the line-up as Klopp explained:
Advertisement
“Now it is Simon’s chance. I know how strong Loris Karius is, but unfortunately he couldn’t show it in the last one or two games,” Klopp said.
“I am absolutely not interested in public pressure, but I am interested in the boy and there is no reason to push him through this situation.
“It’s not that he immediately wanted a hug. When you are at the right club and you are not in the best moment, you step aside for a moment, train hard, improve, get back to your best shape and then we will see what happens.
“But, of course, for the player, it was not the best moment in his life.”
Mignolet’s return ended with a 50th clean sheet in all competitions for the club and he was rarely tested beyond a strong left-handed save which kept out a rising shot from Viktor Fischer.
Advertisement
By then, Liverpool had already eked out an advantage. In the 29th minute a ball wide from Mané encouraged Clyne to burst into space and his cross to the back post was measured to perfection. Lallana, leaping above Adam Forshaw, dispatched the header.
By the end, Lallana had added another strike and conjured the assist, which means he has had a hand in 12 goals already this term. It took him the whole of the previous campaign to reach double figures in this respect and his redeployment in a midfield three, rather than as part of an attacking triumvirate, has allowed his influence to grow.
Middlesbrough had no one who could come close to matching his guile, and head coach Aitor Karanka knows the task of adding extra quality in January is the toughest part of his job. The pace of Adama Traoré troubled Liverpool down the right, but too often Alvaro Negredo was isolated and a visiting defence shorn of the reassuring presence of Joel Matip, who had suffered a recurrence of his ankle injury, never looked like unravelling.
“My thoughts are we have lost against one of the best teams in the country,” said Karanka.
“We were more aggressive in the first half, but in the second half it was impossible. Liverpool were much better than us. Their intensity, their quality on the ball, everything.
Advertisement
“Even when they were winning 2-0 they kept the same intensity, they passed with the same speed and won the ball back with the same aggression.
“Like Chelsea, they are the really strong candidates to win the league. We have played all the top teams and they are as good as any of them.”
The only surprise was that it had taken until the 60th minute for that spellbinding second goal and breathing space to arrive. Mané had struck the post immediately before the break after bursting onto Origi’s pass and found himself thwarted by Víctor Valdés, the Middlesbrough goalkeeper, soon after the interval.
With Liverpool clicking through the gears, and for once not prone to sloppiness, the third arrived eight minutes later.
Mané was again involved, slipping away from tackles and linking twice with Origi, whose cross evaded Antonio Barragán and Marten de Roon, who were both left floundering hopelessly on the turf, and Lallana side-footed his finish into a gaping goal.
Advertisement
If Liverpool aborted a goalkeeping experiment on Teesside, then more importantly for Klopp, they also managed to stop the rot after a recent wobble.