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Football

28th Jan 2018

Belfast’s Chris Brunt compounds Liverpool’s misery with outrageous piece of skill

A tough watch for Liverpool fans

Ben Kiely

Chris Brunt

Liverpool were already having a tough enough time on Saturday before Chris Brunt went and did that.

Chris Brunt was undoubtedly a very happy man on Sunday morning. The Belfast native featured in West Brom’s 3-2 away win over Liverpool in the fourth round of the FA Cup.

Apparently, Brunt actually used some foul language during the broadcast, although it went unnoticed by many. BT Sport apologised for his ‘industrial’ language which left fans scratching their heads.

While the VAR was implemented to cancel out a West Brom goal, perhaps it would have been better put to use to let everyone hear what Brunt actually said. (We kid!)

Let’s not sugarcoat it, Saturday was a miserable day for Reds supporters.

Roberto Firmino’s opener after just six minutes lifted their spirits. If you were to freeze that moment in time, there would have been such hope for Liverpool fans. It was a promising start, a real statement of intent and it looked like it was going to be the first of many.

Unfortunately, it only lasted a moment.

68 seconds later, West Brom were level through Jay Rodriguez. Four minutes later, he added his second. Before the referee blew his whistle for half-time, Firmino missed a penalty and a Joel Matip own goal made it 3-1 to the good.

After the break, the home crowd had to endure a significant amount of time without scoring. It would take until 12 minutes from the end for Mohamed Salah to grab a consolation goal, but even at that, West Brom deserved the unlikely victory.

Just when all hope seemed lost and Liverpool were staring down the barrel of a shock Cup exit, Brunt made it worse. After winning possession with a tremendous sliding effort in his own half, he played the ball back to Grzegorz Krychowiak. Despite seeing Brunt on his arse, Krychowiak decided to hit an optimistic lobbed pass straight back to the Northern Irishman.

Perhaps he knew what was coming next. He knew that somehow, some way Brunt would complete the one-two.

The home crowd should have just left Anfield at that point. If ever there was an indication that the day wasn’t going to go their way, that was it.

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