Madrid Were Lucky, and How We Need to Stop Worrying and Learn to Enjoy Football Again

Jürgen Klopp makes football fun. Let's let him revitalise the team and let's relax until we get there

I'm still reeling not from the performance, but from the surreal scoreline and the overreaction to it.

The keep-ball of Madrid at 4-2 and 5-2 was galling, but by then any opponent would feel that Madrid made a pact with the devil and get all the luck.

Even when Madrid made it 4-2, the xG for the game was almost exactly 2-1 to Liverpool, which shows how against the balance of play being 4-2 up was.

After all, two of those goals were utter flukes.

The 5th, when Liverpool were worn down, was superbly taken, as was the first, out of nothing – a 15% chance of scoring taken by an elite player. Fair play, but also, against the run of play.

I've spoken about the peak-end rule, in that the way an experience peaks and the way it ends determine how it's perceived. In this case, it ended badly, but that skewed the distant peaks of Liverpool's great attacking, and the more recent trough of Madrid's numbing goals.

To say that Liverpool continue to improve (in some aspects) may seem weird after a 5-2 home defeat, but equally, had the major moments of the same game been played again, almost all the goals would not have happened, as they were so freakish. And others that did not go in would, more often than not, end up in goals.

Replay the attack where Liverpool have two efforts scrambled off the line, and it ends in a goal; replay the Karim Benzema shot that hits Joe Gomez's backside and goes in, and it remains a one-in-a-hundred chance of goal, even if he actually hits a better shot.

For those who didn't see it on the main site, I turned a piece I was writing for here into a big freebie, to counter some of the hysteria.

Hysterical Overreactions Won't Help Liverpool – Already 40% a "New" Team

Also, I don't think I can live in the constant crisis mode of modern football.

That's partly why I created this ZenDen. I keep reaching my own crisis point, which is the crisis point of being sick of the crises points in football.

I’m not sure how much longer I can face the stressful hysteria that surrounds every setback, and even if you ignore the worst places (such as Twitter), the poison seeps into the water.

Everything gets contaminated, and at other clubs, it has led to insane fan protests over relatively little. So many people online are trying to prove themselves right that they get obsessive, angry, unhinged. At Liverpool, it’s not got that bad, but having a below-par season should be forgivable. Yes, get angry at times, briefly; but then get rational.

Everyone is allowed the very occasional post-match meltdown, but the next day, people need to be calmer. That’s always been the TTT ethos, since we launched the original site in 2009.

People with bad social network groups, via Twitter or WhatsApp, or maybe just a bunch of miserable old bastards down the pub, get inundated with bad ideas, bad vibes, and the psychological effect 'negativity bias' that means everything feels up to five times worse than it really is. Doomsayers are now always at our devices.

I just listened to an interview with someone absolutely revolutionising another sport, with an unparalleled winning run and about the biggest reversal of fortune in that game, and his insights blew my mind. I want to discuss that interview below, and how it’s a stark reminder of the whole bloody point of all this.