Newcastle: Trent Alexander-Arnold hailed Liverpool’s comeback from 1-0 down to win 2-1 at Newcastle with 10 men on Sunday as one of the Reds best ever wins under Jurgen Klopp.
Alexander-Arnold was fortunate to escape a red card after just six minutes before his mistake allowed Anthony Gordon to open the scoring for Newcastle.
Virgil van Dijk was then dismissed inside the opening half hour for bringing down Alexander Isak.
However, the Magpies failed to make their man advantage count and were punished when Darwin Nunez came off the bench to score twice in the final nine minutes plus stoppage time.
“We had to do it the hard way, the very hard way. But we all pulled together, dug deep and delivered something for the ages,” Alexander-Arnold told Sky Sports.
“One of our best performances since the manager has come in, and we’ve had some outstanding performances as a team. We’ll look back on this game as something very, very special.”
Nunez has struggled to live up to his club record #85 million price tag since joining from Benfica just over a year ago.
The Uruguayan is yet to start a game this season, but showed what he is capable of with his pace to get in behind the Newcastle defence and two powerful finishes.
“After we went a man down the team played really well,” said Nunez.
“We work really hard for these moments and I am happy to score the two goals to help the team.”
Klopp praises Nunez
Juergen Klopp gave credit to Nunez for his brilliant outing on Sunday. The 24-year-old Uruguayan has been out of favour so far this season, but his late brace against the Magpies showcased the best of his qualities and he will get more chances, Klopp told Sky Sports.
“He was obviously fired up about not playing, not starting, and he put all the energy into those two shots ... it was a super-mature performance and two top-class goals,” a delighted Klopp said as he reflected on what he described as one of the best victories of his career.
“It’s early in the season, you need to find stability. We need to find a formation you need to get results, and then we play every three days and everybody will play, there’s no doubt about that,” Klopp explained.
“Definitely, a striker scores two goals and you can see he gets a smile on his face, and rightly so. But for the team, it was super-important that they got something like that, you need these kinds of things to grow together,” Klopp added.
Back-to-back single-goal defeats to Manchester City and Liverpool will leave Newcastle playing catch-up in the league, and manager Eddie Howe said it will be a challenge to pick his players up again.
“There was a lot of good, we should have put the game to bed and that is probably the thing we are all kicking ourselves with,” Howe told Sky Sports.
“There will be a lot of emotion. For us, we’ve had three really tough opening games, won one and lost two. The two we lost were lost by the narrowest of margins, and they were against the best two teams in the Premier League,” he added.
