Alisson, the goalkeeper who got away from Napoli, has made Liverpool a team without individual weakness

The sun was shining in Sardinia and Alisson Becker, from behind the darkness of his sunglasses, was staring out across the settled blue waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea. In a few hours, a hydrofoil could have taken him to the Gulf of Naples. Inside a rented villa, his agent was holding a rapid-fire telephone conversation with a prominent film producer representing another club that wanted to sign him. The agent was called Ze Maria Neis and he’d been instructed by his client that he wanted to go to Liverpool. The prominent film producer was called Aurelio De Laurentiis, the chairman of SS Napoli.

Supposedly, Napoli were able to lay on all of the luxuries being offered by Liverpool and De Laurentiis was angry that he was unable to break an agreement that was already in place, leading him to publicly question the links between Liverpool’s owners, Fenway Sports Group, and one of its partners in Thomas DiBenedetto, a Bostonian whose stake in Roma is complex.

Contact between Liverpool and Roma was made before the clubs met in the Champions League semi-final last season and discussions were suspended for a fortnight before resuming once Liverpool had progressed to the final in Kiev. There had been interest from Real Madrid too, though Ze Maria had established through his contacts in Spain that Thibaut Courtois was their first choice because his contract at Chelsea was nearly up. The Belgian was a cheaper option and the summer of 2018 was not going to be one where new transfer records were broken at Santiago Bernabeu, particularly for a goalkeeper.

Alisson spoke to Roberto Firmino about the lifestyle on Merseyside and was told that his happiness was reflected by the agreement of a new five-year contract. Though Philippe Coutinho had since departed for Barcelona, he too suggested that Liverpool was a calm place for his family to live, comparing the privacy afforded there with the madness of Barcelona or, indeed, the Italian capital where Alisson had spent the previous two seasons. The goalkeeper’s English is better than he likes to make out and it was enough to understand the enthusiasm of Jurgen Klopp, who joked after Liverpool put seven past Roma across two legs that it would have been as many as fourteen had the Brazilian not been there to intervene.

Klopp uses exaggeration as a tool. “If I knew Alisson was this good – I would have paid double,” he told Jamie Carragher in a pitch-side interview at Anfield last night, as the crowd whirled their red and white scarfs, celebrating Liverpool’s progress at the expense of the club he could have gone to. “Alisson, Alisson, Alisson,” they repeated, as though they had witnessed the slaying of a beast by a gladiator. Somewhere behind Klopp in the main stand was De Laurentiis – a man not used to dealing with the whiplash of rejection – stood there with his arms folded surely contemplating what might have happened had Alisson been representing his team rather than David Ospina, a goalkeeper who wasted his peak years at Arsenal trying unsuccessfully to displace a fading Petr Cech.

It was a night that served as a reminder that football is largely defined by recruitment and in this case, reach. Liverpool’s tentacles were already wrapped around Alisson and his advisory team by the time Napoli made their approach. His injury-time save from Arkadiusz Milik seemed to go on forever. There was the length of the cross, the distance it travelled from Jose Callejon’s left foot. There was Milik stumbling and the sense of the moment slipping away from him, though nobody knew for certain. Liverpool might have deserved elimination because of the poverty of their away form in this group but they did not deserve to lose or even draw this game. It should have been 5-1 by now. It had been the same at Burnley last Wednesday. It was 2-1 to Liverpool, it would end 3-1 but it could have been 2-2 had it not been for Alisson, whose reach would deny Ben Mee at Turf Moor before his capacity to make himself into a human starfish ended Napoli’s Champions League campaign. This save was pure instinct. There had been no opportunity for thought. He had to make himself big. It is what Peter Schmeichel would have done.

Alisson’s arrival has made Liverpool into a team without individual weakness. It feels like in some games there is work to be done on the balance of the midfield but this is down to combinations rather than personalities.

It is one of Liverpool’s strengths to sniff out deficiencies of opponents and exploit them. The Napoli players involved in the crucial goal illustrated this because one was Ospina, who let Mohamed Salah’s shot squirm through his legs and the other was Mario Rui, a Portuguese left back at his sixth Italian club in seven seasons. At 27 years old, he had made his international debut only this year and it was clear this stage was too grand. Watching him trying to follow a recharged Salah was like watching a go-cart competing in Formula One.

Liverpool’s challenge remained enormous, however. There had been a determination to bill this encounter as ‘Olympiakos: Part II’ because of the mathematical relationship between margins at this stage of the competition.

Yet there were massive differences in the context, because even though Olympiakos were the weakest side in the group 14 years ago, they were still not a side that Liverpool were really expected to beat. Napoli have consistently been among the best teams in Italy since Liverpool last met them at Anfield in 2010 and here there was an expectation – or at least, a wider impression – that Liverpool would prevail because of the manner of their progression to last season’s Champions League final and the momentum of their league form.

Liverpool is not a club that historically has suited being favourites – even subtle or misunderstood ones, especially against well-equipped teams trying to meet the same target. But maybe that is changing. It feels like they have sorted their recruitment. They have capitalised on their reach. They have Alisson.