Liverpool were the better side by some margin on Wednesday evening when they took on Atletico Madrid under the lights at Anfield in the Champions League.
The Reds had twice as many shot attempts and recorded around three expected goals worth of chances compared to Atletico’s half a goal worth. Despite that, heading into stoppage time the game was level 2-2 and it took a late, late winner from captain Virgil van Dijk to secure the victory.
It may have been a late winner, then, but it was a clearly deserved winner. Which is the sort of thing new summer signing Jeremie Frimpong is a little bit familiar with from his time at Bayer Leverkusen.
“Sometimes you score last minute,” Frimpong noted. “I’ve had a lot of last-minute goals in my career so far, obviously with Leverkusen. But the most important thing is that we won and I think we deserved to win. We were the better team, played really well.”
Leverkusen became known for late goals during their Bundesliga winning 2023-24 campaign, eventually earning that iteration of the club the nickname Neverlusen. More often than not, though, those late goals and wins were a fair reflection of the preceding match.
Proof that if you’re the better side and you keep pushing and playing your game while the opposition tires, good things do tend to happen sooner or later.
“In a match you never know when you’re going to score,” Frimpong added. “Of course you’d like to score earlier but sometimes it doesn’t work like that. Like I said, it’s part of football. Sometimes you score late, sometimes you score early. It’s just like that.
“When you’re 2-0 up, of course we want to keep the lead or score more. But it’s the Champions League, we’re playing Atletico Madrid, of course we can do better to stop it but it’s football.”