Jota, Darwin and Bradley ensure Liverpool cope just fine without Salah and Alexander-Arnold

This might be the best example yet of a Liverpool 2023/24 performance.

First and most obviously, it’s one that delivered an impressive result. More often than not, this has been the case. It also had the distinctly Liverpool quality of being far, far better in the second half than the first.

It’s a win that will be glossed over by others as ‘only Bournemouth’ when Bournemouth’s only defeats in their last 10 games have come away at Manchester City and Tottenham. They haven’t lost a home league game in three months, and were at that point a very different prospect.

But its most Liverpool quality of all was the manner in which they simply coped with problems placed in their way, adapted, and got it done. The two most influential attacking footballers for Liverpool are Mo Salah and Trent Alexander-Arnold. Neither was available here, and yet they ran in four goals in an inspired second-half performance where neither man was missed.

Darwin Nunez started and finished the scoring and will inevitably attract much of the attention because he’s that kind of footballer. For good or bad, it’s rare for Darwin to turn in a performance that can be described as anonymous.

It may well prove an important day for Darwin, who remains the sort of player who could absolutely embark on a hot streak of scoring on the back of such an afternoon. Perhaps he was inspired by the earlier efforts of a kindred spirit. But the most important performance of the afternoon for Liverpool was that of Diogo Jota. Nominally playing through the middle of a flexible and fluid front three, he teed up the opener in a delightfully slick passing move early in the second half and then scored the next two.

All three goals came from him taking up inside-right positions. It wasn’t quite a Salahesque performance, but the output certainly was. Two goals and an assist is precisely the sort of thing Jurgen Klopp would have been hoping for from one of his other forwards in the absence of his best one.

There were other impressive performances in green and white, with Alexis Mac Allister and Ibrahima Konate both eye-catching in an otherwise worryingly if understandably disjointed and off-pace Liverpool performance. But if Darwin will get most of the headlines and Diogo Jota second billing then it would be remiss not to mention Conor Bradley.

If replacing Mo Salah in this Liverpool team is among the more thankless tasks in Premier League football, then replacing Alexander-Arnold isn’t far behind. Bradley is, and this should shock nobody, not Trent Alexander-Arnold and it’s very unlikely he ever will be. What he absolutely could be on this evidence is an extremely accomplished if somewhat more orthodox right-back.

He certainly has Alexander-Arnold’s attacking intent, if not his desire and aptitude for popping up in midfield and running games from there. He’s your more traditional attack-minded right-back, keen to run at and pin back his marker and he certainly played his part even before a neat cutback earned him a deserved assist for Diogo Jota’s vaguely comical and match-sealing third goal.

If the game itself was a pretty good example of everything that makes this Liverpool team so beguiling this season, and its potential so high, their third goal was all of it in microcosm. The counter-attack that created the chance in the first place was potent and slick, but it was the manner of Diogo Jota’s finish that so perfectly encapsulated this Liverpool. He tried to shoot first time, but made such a complete mess of it that it instead teed him up to shoot with his second. He did so with a true and unerring finish into the bottom corner.

Isn’t that what Liverpool have been about all season? Making the best of bad situations and turning apparent misfortune into excellent outcomes? This is a team taking all its crisitunities and currently enjoying a five-point lead at the top of the table.

The only minor quibble is that they didn’t fall behind before scoring their four second-half goals. That truly would have been the full Liverpool, but there was enough gulf between the staccato, uncertain football of the first half and the slick precision of the second to render such things as utterly unnecessary nit-picking.

It’s still unlikely that Liverpool have quite enough about them at this stage of their cycle to withstand Manchester City in full second-half-of-the-season mode. But they absolutely have enough about them that such predictions cannot be made with certainty. This is a Liverpool team that almost always seems to find a way.