Photo by Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images
Liverpool assistant manager Peter Krawietz reflects on the 4-0 victory over Barcelona a year ago.
It’s been a year since Liverpool staged the greatest comeback in the history of the Champions League knockout rounds when they beat Barcelona 4-0 at Anfield to overcome a 3-0 first leg deficit.
It was an achievement to pair with their own greatest comeback in the history of the Champions League, the overturning a 3-0 halftime deficit against AC Milan in the 2005 final in Istanbul.
And with no live football to watch with football on hold due to coronavirus, the anniversary of that victory over Barcelona has a lot of people reminiscing today—including Liverpool assistant manager Peter Krawietz.
“We wanted to make a change and I was talking to Joe Gomez, and suddenly the whole stadium exploded,” Krawietz said of the moment the Reds won the tie with a quickly taken corner cooly slotted home.
Manager Jürgen Klopp has previously talked, too, about not seeing the goal live, with Liverpool’s coaching staff busy preparing to make a substitution in the hopes of getting that fourth goal they needed.
“I thought, ‘Oops, what happened?’” Krawietz added of the moment. “Everybody is celebrating so the ball obviously hit the net! It must have been a good one but, to be honest, I didn’t see it!”
While the moment seemed rather miraculous to all in who saw it—or didn’t—that day, it wasn’t a result out of nothing, with Liverpool having felt hard done by for the score in a first leg they thought they played well in.
“Everything started with the game in Barcelona,” he noted. “I am completely convinced that we played a really, really good game. We played well but didn’t score and they scored with situations nearly out of nothing.
“We, the coaching staff, had the feeling, ‘come on, we should have got more from this game’ and we saw that we had the right ideas. It’s not over until the final whistle so everything is still possible.
“So while I don’t want to say preparing for the second game was easy, we knew we had a good plan, we knew that for Barcelona it would be more difficult than they can think about or at the moment imagine.”
