Anfield was almost empty. The stewards led the last supporters towards the stairwells. The cleaners swept the aisles. The television crews packed up what was left of their equipment. A father and son were walking past the shelters. They wanted to go see the Kop. A deserted Kop but the Kop nonetheless.
Luca Percassi put his arm around his boy and hugged him. Percassi’s father, Antonio, played for Atalanta in the 1970s. Luca has remained general manager since they sold a majority stake in the club to Steve Pagliuca, chairman of Bain Capital and co-owner of the Boston Celtics, he a few years ago. His son, the third generation of Percassis, was spoiled as an Atalanta fan. “It’s something unique, something extraordinary,” Luca said before kick-off.
Other Italian teams have won at Anfield. Genoa was the first to participate in the ancestor of this competition, the UEFA Cup, in 1992 with an avatar of Gian Piero Gasperini on the bench, Osvaldo Bagnoli. Inter Milan emerged victorious from this Stanley Park team but eliminated from the Champions League two years ago. Such results were one-off. Stories for grandchildren. The moments when smiling may never happen again in a footballer’s life. And yet Atalanta, improbably, did it again.
After beating Liverpool on Merseyside during Covid-19 in the Champions League group stages, they achieved an unprecedented record and, almost four years later, played each other back-to-back. So much has changed in the meantime. Seven of the winning XI at Anfield in 2020 have left. The scorers of this evening, Josip Ilicic and Robin Gosens, were undoubtedly the most difficult players to replace. This was, by most metrics (points accumulated and goals scored), the best Atalanta team of all time. Thursday’s team effort, however, was something else.
“It tastes completely different,” Gasperini said.
The last team to win 3-0 at Anfield in Europe was Real Madrid. It was before Jurgen Klopp and almost ten years ago, a Liverpool team much less formidable than the one faced by Atalanta last night. There was Simon Mignolet, Joe Allen, Alberto Moreno and Mario Balotelli, not Virgil van Dijk, World Cup winner Alexis Mac Allister and €85m (£73m; $91m) Darwin Nunez . The substitutes were Adam Lallana and Lazar Markovic, not Mohamed Salah, Luis Diaz and Dominik Szoboszlai.
Atalanta was not, on paper, complete either. Marco Carnesecchi, Gasperini’s first-choice goalkeeper, missed the Europa League matches in order to give game time to error-prone Juan Musso, an expensive signing by Atalanta standards. The Atalanta coach also had to do without his best central defender Giorgio Scalvini and lost Sead Kolasinac to injury the day before the match.
None of that mattered.
Even though Atalanta were lucky at times not to concede, such as when Harvey Elliott hit the bar and Nunez missed one chance after another, the scoreline did not flatter them. The first chance of the match fell to Mario Pasalic and it was a mystery how Teun Koopmeiners, Atalanta’s midfielder and top scorer this season, failed to score more than two one-on-ones on either side of half-time. . On another night it could have been like that famous 4-3 win over Valencia at the Mestalla in 2020, a night where Ilicic played like a Ballon d’Or contender. This victory was more prestigious.
But was it a surprise? On one level, of course. Liverpool hadn’t lost at Anfield all season. They had overcome their injury crisis, Klopp’s unused substitutes (Trent Alexander-Arnold and Ryan Gravenberch) showed the hosts’ depth and, unlike Atalanta’s last win here, the Anfield gates were not locked due to the pandemic. It was a full house.
In this context, Atalanta’s victory caused a certain amount of astonishment. But Gasperini normalized the extraordinary. In the 84 years before his appointment as manager of that club, Atalanta competed in Europe three times (even reaching the semi-finals of the Cup Winners’ Cup as a Serie B side in 1988 ). Since then, they have qualified for all but one of his eight seasons in charge.
Not only did Atalanta triumph over Liverpool at Anfield (twice), but they also upset Erik ten Hag’s Ajax in Amsterdam and came within seconds of a Champions League semi-final in 2020 .A draw and with all his replacements gone, Gasp was helpless. since Paris Saint-Germain scored twice in stoppage time against a team forced to play with ten men following the injury to Remo Freuler.
Memories like those from Thursday night are now less shocking, but only a little. Once upon a time, Atalanta was a club that yo-yoed between Serie A and Serie B. It seems like a long time ago now. Gasperini brought Atalanta into Europe for the first time since 1991 and it became the rule rather than the exception. He took the club to their first Coppa Italia final in 23 years, returned and could make it another this season. All he’s missing is a trophy. He has built and sold, then built and sold three different Atalanta teams and, while Thursday’s triumph may be different in personnel terms to the one won at Anfield in 2020, it was not in philosophy.
Under Gasperini, Atalanta have always been bold. They took risks, playing on the front foot and competing man-to-man all over the pitch. He has in the past been criticized for not taking a more measured approach. But look where that approach got him. New frontiers. Unexplored territory.
Still undefeated in the Europa League this season, Atalanta beat the present and perhaps also the future of Liverpool. They beat Ruben Amorim’s Sporting Lisbon both home and away. The mercurial Gianluca Scamacca scored in both games against the Portuguese leaders. Excluded from the last national selection in March, if Luciano Spalletti’s intention was to provoke a reaction, he indeed obtained it. That’s now six goals in his last six appearances.
GO FURTHER
Atalanta never ceases to amaze – they seem motivated for another match in the Champions League
Scamacca’s double on Thursday was a story in itself. No Italian player has ever left Anfield with one like this. “It’s not about any revenge,” he insisted, despite Scamacca being widely believed to be the player Spalletti was referring to when criticizing modern footballers in an interview with Gazzetta dello Sport. “You come on an international mission to win the Euros, not Call of Duty,” Spalletti said. “If modern football is playing on PlayStation until four in the morning when there is a match the next day, then modern football is no good.”
It remains to be seen whether Scamacca can maintain this until the end of the season – the goal, not Call of Duty – and show the consistency his career has lacked thus far. “A lot of times he plays in spurts,” Gasperini said. “He can have very good first minutes, fade away, lose a little confidence, come out of the game and he’s no longer the same player. Today he played a full 90 minutes, perhaps for the first time. Only in this way can he become a top player.
Scamacca embodied everything that was great about Atalanta at Anfield. The focus was on his composed finishing, but he was both physical and skilful, in Premier League profile, like so many Atalanta players. On-field coach Marten de Roon was tactically magnificent in replacing the left centre-back. Ederson and Pasalic roamed the field like a pair of Pac-Men. At halftime it looked like Atalanta had run enough for 90 minutes in 45. But they kept going and Gasperini, in the end, made only one substitution, replacing Charles De Ketelaere with Aleksei Miranchuk in the final seconds.
“I didn’t want to touch anything,” he said. “I was scared because the guys were still fine. Maybe it was the result, but we played with enthusiasm and seemed less tired than at other times in the match. We were more courageous than in the last matches. There was a desire to pursue them and put pressure all over the field. We knew it was a bit risky but that we could also cause them problems.
Pep Guardiola once said that playing for Gasperini’s Atalanta was like going to the dentist. Jurgen Klopp laughed the day before the match when Sky Italia journalist Gianluigi Bagnulo told him that, given the work he had done on his smile, he was not afraid of drills and sharp instruments. But Klopp was no longer smiling full-time at Anfield, or at least his smile didn’t match that on the away side. While one supporter grabbed the anorak that Gasperini had thrown to the crowd as a souvenir, another held a banner for “those who couldn’t be there.” They didn’t know what they were missing.
It was particularly poignant.
Atalanta’s Champions League was played in 2019-20 and 2020-21 starting with a match at the San Siro rather than the Gewiss Stadium. Bergamo then became ground zero for the pandemic in Europe, photos of trucks parked in front of a local hospital to evacuate the dead put football into perspective. When the matches returned, they took place behind closed doors. Fans weren’t able to see the team’s exploits in person.
In modern football, with teams the size of Atalanta living in the shadow of vultures ready to attack their best players, it was fair to wonder if they would ever get another chance to see their boys at Anfield, let alone win there again. . No Italian team had ever done it before. Seeing Atalanta do it again was the experience of a lifetime.
That’s why Thursday was so special. “It’s happiness,” Gasperini said.
(Top photo: Darren Staples/AFP via Getty Images)