Liverpool’s Champions League opener against Atletico Madrid must be the night Anfield fully embraces the Andoni Iraola era.
Riptide entered the English language in the nineteenth century, describing rough, disturbed water and a current capable of carrying something somewhere it never intended to go.
Football has its own version of that at Anfield, those strange passages when the atmosphere no longer seems to follow the game but begins to pull it somewhere else entirely.
Jamie Carragher tried to explain that distinction on Monday Night Football in November 2024, after Liverpool had gone into half time behind against Brighton and emerged to score twice in 128 seconds.
Fulham had been leading at Anfield in December 2023 before Wataru Endo and Trent Alexander-Arnold scored 79 seconds apart.
Luton led there two months later before Virgil van Dijk and Cody Gakpo turned the game in 125 seconds. Brighton became the third example in less than a year.
Carragher called it ‘the Anfield factor’.
Arne Slot had arrived promising a little more control than Jurgen Klopp, but Carragher’s point was that there are passages of football in this stadium which simply refuse to be controlled:
“Anfield just takes you on a ride and sweeps your feet away. You cannot control that as a manager.”
The numbers suggest it was more than nostalgia from a former player.
Liverpool are best when they capitalise on momentum
Since Carragher made that observation, Liverpool have produced at least a dozen more competitive home matches in which two of their goals were recorded no more than five minutes apart.
Leverkusen conceded in the 61st and 63rd minutes three days after the Brighton comeback; Leicester were struck either side of half time on Boxing Day; Southampton were hit in the 51st and 55th minutes; Arsenal in the 20th and 21st.
Last season Wolves conceded in the 41st and 42nd, Newcastle in the 41st and 43rd, Galatasaray in the 51st and 53rd.
It is not a tactical pattern in any meaningful sense and it is certainly not evidence of something supernatural. It is simply a recurring feature of Anfield matches: when Liverpool find one goal, there are occasions when the next few minutes become extraordinarily difficult for an opponent to survive.
Andoni Iraola already knows what those minutes feel like. His three visits to Anfield as Bournemouth manager all ended in defeat, but it was the last one which stayed with him.
Bournemouth arrived for the opening game of the 2025/26 Premier League season and, after falling 2-0 behind, Antoine Semenyo scored twice to drag them level with 14 minutes remaining.
At 2-2, Iraola believed his side could take something. Federico Chiesa came off the bench and volleyed Liverpool back in front in the 88th minute. Mo Salah scored again in the fourth minute of stoppage time, and a game Bournemouth had recovered became a 4-2 defeat.
Bournemouth had done the hard part; they had survived Anfield, recovered from two goals down and reached the final minutes with parity. Then the ground changed.
Iraola recalled this immediately after becoming Liverpool manager in June.
“He scored and the place erupted. It was crazy,” he said of Chiesa’s goal, before explaining that he now wanted to experience it from the other side.
After that Bournemouth game, he had already remarked that an evening kick-off produced a “completely different atmosphere” from his previous afternoon visits.
For all the talk of pressing, verticality and the similarities people have searched for between Iraola and Klopp, that might be the most revealing thing he has said since taking the job.
He did not arrive at Liverpool only because the squad is better than the one he left on the south coast or because the Champions League represents the next stage of an ambitious coaching career; he understood that Liverpool offers a manager access to something he has previously only had to endure.
The difficulty is that he has not really experienced it yet.
Anfield suffered a hangover from last season
Nottingham Forest was supposed to mark the beginning of Iraola’s competitive Anfield life. In his programme notes, he wrote that Liverpool did not merely want to tap into the passion of the stadium, “we have to.”
What followed was a 2-2 draw on an afternoon when there were moments of noise, particularly when Alexander Isak and Victor Munoz twice pulled Liverpool level, but the prevailing mood was flatter.
The groans were familiar. Frustration attached itself to individual mistakes and old anxieties resurfaced quickly.
None of it felt directed at Iraola personally. It felt more like the emotional residue of a miserable previous season being carried into the first home game of the next one.
Liverpool supporters haven’t rejected Iraola. Plenty are desperate for him to succeed and that probably explains why the frustration has felt so pronounced when things haven’t looked right.
They have seen enough of his football to understand the possibilities and enough of his personality to recognise why the club were attracted to him.
What they have not yet been given is the clean break that new managerial eras are supposed to provide.
Two opening draws, at Newcastle and at home to Forest, were followed by Friday night’s first league victory at Ipswich. Two Alexander Isak goals inside nine minutes offered a glimpse of the aggression Iraola wants, but five points from nine is not the sort of start that bulldozes doubt from the fanbase.
And the transfer window did not help. Liverpool’s summer business generated excitement in some areas and irritation in others, with fans still questioning whether the squad has been constructed to solve the problems which helped wreck last season.
The result is an unusual mood around the club: curiosity without complete conviction, excitement competing with suspicion and a new manager trying to create momentum among supporters who have not entirely finished processing what came before him.
At the moment, there are probably still more doubters than believers.
Atletico represents Iraola’s real first Anfield occasion
While Forest marked Iraola’s competitive Anfield arrival, Wednesday’s meeting with Atletico Madrid occupies a different psychological space – this is the first night where the scale of the job really comes into view.
The biggest ground Iraola had previously called home as a manager was Rayo Vallecano’s Estadio de Vallecas, at around 14,700.
Even if you put together the stadium capacities of AEK Larnaca, Mirandes, Rayo and Bournemouth, Anfield would still have more than 21,000 seats to spare. That is the jump he has made.
He knows big stadiums and big occasions, obviously, but there is a difference between walking into one as the opposition manager and having 61,000 people looking to you to set the tone.
And it is Atletico Madrid. This fixture scarcely needs manufactured significance.
The Champions League anthem under the Anfield floodlights does enough of the work itself, while Atletico’s previous visits provide more reminders of how quickly this ground can distort a game.
Liverpool were two goals ahead inside six minutes last season before Marcos Llorente somehow dragged Diego Simeone’s side back to 2-2. Virgil van Dijk then won it in stoppage time.
Atletico experienced both versions of Anfield in the same evening: the early surge that threatens to bury you and the late one that refuses to let you leave with anything.
For Iraola, it offers something Forest could not. A Saturday lunchtime in August, played against the background of last year’s discontent, was never guaranteed to produce the emotional reset people had imagined.
A European night against Atletico is different territory. The scarves will be out, the noise before kick-off will carry more venom and the occasion can drag supporters towards the new manager before the football has fully convinced.
That does not absolve Iraola or his players of their side of the bargain.
Anfield’s reputation has occasionally become an excuse to blame supporters when a team gives them little to which they can respond.
The great European nights were never created by volume in isolation. A tackle, a press, a shot, a grievance, an opponent wasting time or a player sprinting 40 yards to recover possession can provide the spark.
The crowd amplifies it and sends it back. Eventually it becomes difficult to establish where the pitch ends and the terraces begin.
Iraola appears to understand that relationship better than most newcomers.
Before Forest, he spoke about players needing to behave in a way that makes a supporter think: if I were on that pitch, I would do the same.
It was not a demand for blind noise. It was recognition that communion has to be earned.
Perhaps that is why Wednesday feels important beyond three Champions League points. Iraola said on the day he was appointed that a new manager has to “earn the right to belong.”
Three months later, the football is developing, the doubts remain and his first Anfield afternoon passed without the stadium fully attaching itself to the new era.
The riptide cannot be scheduled for Wednesday night, of course. It may never arrive.
Atletico may quieten the ground, Liverpool may frustrate it, or the game may simply refuse to become the emotional spectacle the fixture seems to promise.
But this is the night Iraola imagined when he accepted the job: Champions League football, Anfield under lights and 60,000 people capable of turning a few good minutes into something an opponent cannot easily escape.
He has already stood on the other side and felt the current turn against him. Now Iraola gets to find out what Anfield feels like when it pulls in his direction.
Source: www.thisisanfield.com
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