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At first glance, the scoreline of Liverpool’s 3-1 win over Sheffield United on Thursday offers no red flags. The Premier League leaders were expected to pick up a dominant win against the league’s last place team, and they did by many metrics. They had 82.6% of the ball, 29 shots to Sheffield’s five, nearly 1,000 touches and a 90.9% passing accuracy on their nearly 800 passes, as well as the goals that accompany such a performance.
There was an 18-minute span, though, in which that almost did not matter.
James McAfee’s cross from the right found Gustavo Hamer on the far post, but his inability to get a great shot off did not matter. The ball came off Conor Bradley, who unassumingly sent it into the back of his own net to level the scoreline at 1-1.
A couple of Liverpool’s less-than-ideal habits came back to haunt them — their struggle to keep a clean sheet and their sometimes wasteful approach to shot-taking. The Reds have now gone six games in all competitions without shutting out the opposition and sometimes make matches nervier than needed, a problem that’s exacerbated their attacking strategy. For their 29 shots against Sheffield, they posted just 1.65 expected goals and the low conversion rate is not entirely uncommon for them — their 30 shots in a 2-1 win over Brighton and Hove Albion on Sunday generated just 2.83 expected goals, to cite one example. They rank as the Premier League’s best team in terms of shots with 601 — 60 more than second-place Manchester City — but their shot quality is all over the place. The Reds are 14th in the league for shot-on-goal percentage at 34.6%.
To Liverpool’s credit, though, the asterisks on their record find a way of becoming irrelevant. That’s not only demonstrated by the fact that Alexis Mac Allister and Cody Gakpo scored in the final 15 minutes to ensure they would return to the top of the table by the final whistle. The Reds have an impressive ability to mix in enough quality chances with their exorbitant number of shots, and as a result rank first in the Premier League for expected goals with 68. That’s about 10 more than Arsenal, who are posting 58.93 expected goals and outperforming that number with 72 goals this season.
Their defensive record, while imperfect, is ultimately a feature, not a bug. Jurgen Klopp’s team has played incredibly open all season and benefited from it thanks to their quality on both ends of the pitch. They concede more than some — their 28 goals against are four more than Arsenal’s 24, which is why the Gunners are winning the goal difference battle in the title race — but they are structured to get away with it.
It might be a recipe for tension at times, much like it was for 18 minutes against Sheffield. The tightness of the title race perhaps magnifies the struggle each of the contenders will face with just weeks left of the season. In a battle of tight margins, though, Liverpool continue to figure out ways to exaggerate their own powers — and might win their first league title in four years in the process.
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