Joël Matip showcases Liverpool’s defensive steel despite Inter defeat

The last surviving 100% record in this season’s Champions League disappeared at Anfield along with Liverpool’s 28-game unbeaten home run, a sequence stretching back one year and one day, and yet it was a night of reward for Jürgen Klopp. A place in the quarter-finals of the Champions League is the prize that matters, and sufficient to console the Liverpool manager following a 1-0 defeat by Internazionale, but the resilience shown against the Italian champions will also offer compensation as the business end of the season approaches.

Praising Liverpool’s defensive work may seem strange on a night where the main talking points were Alexis Sánchez’s debatable dismissal and a superb finish from Lautaro Martínez, the striker profiting from a loose clearance by Joël Matip and Virgil van Dijk backing off as he shaped to shoot into the top corner from distance.

“That shouldn’t have happened,” the Liverpool manager said. But as well as Inter performed at Anfield, and as open as the last-16 second-leg contest was at times, Liverpool limited the visitors to precious few opportunities to recover the tie with and without a full complement of players. In terms of organisation and individual effort, Klopp’s defence provided the platform for a merited place in the last eight for a fourth time in five years.

Liverpool started as they finished against West Ham on Saturday; a little laboured, lacking their characteristic intensity and quality distribution. High winds, often Klopp’s bugbear, may have been a factor but Inter had few issues with the conditions. They opened with a confident swagger. Nutmegs, backheels and deft chips were a feature of their first-half performance – sometimes all in the same move – as Simone Inzaghi’s team