Bradley Barcola needed six Liverpool appearances to register his first goal. Having finally got it, he needed 42 further minutes to turn it into a hat-trick. On a night of relentless, sometimes absurd football at the Raiffeisen Arena in Linz, Liverpool beat LASK 6-3 in the Champions League league phase — scoring six away from home for the first time since the group stage of this competition became their natural comfort zone, and conceding three to the Austrian champions in a 14-minute stretch that will have Andoni Iraola rewinding the tape rather than enjoying the highlights.
Ronald Araujo, on loan from Barcelona with a £47.1m purchase option attached, headed Liverpool in front from a Kostas Tsimikas corner in the 22nd minute for his first goal for the club. Ninety-six seconds later Barcola made it two. By the 37th minute, taking a pass from Florian Wirtz between the lines, he had his second. Jeremie Frimpong headed in a fourth from another Tsimikas delivery six minutes after the break, Barcola completed his treble in the 66th and Lewis Koumas made it six in the 72nd. In between and afterwards, Robert Ljubicic and Florian Flecker — twice, in the 74th and 77th minutes — ensured the scoreline told two stories at once.
A £123m signing finally looks like one
Barcola arrived in the summer from Paris Saint-Germain for an initial £106m, a fee that can rise to £123m, having won the Champions League in each of the previous two seasons in Paris. He had not scored in his first six Liverpool games. The criticism had been predictable and, by the standards of modern transfer-fee arithmetic, not unreasonable: a club replacing Mohamed Salah, who left for Trabzonspor on a free transfer, had spent heavily on a 24-year-old whose output had not yet travelled.
What Linz offered was not merely three goals but the three different kinds of goal that justify the investment: a finish from a quick central break, a run into the space behind a high line off a Wirtz pass, and a one-on-one taken with the composure of a player who had stopped thinking about his record.
“I’m really happy for Bradley because you were asking me yesterday about him not making the numbers, also Florian,” Iraola said afterwards. “He was a threat always — one-v-one, threatening in behind.” The manager added that he had sensed it coming: “Even in training yesterday, I could feel he was very lively.” On the significance for a player still settling on Merseyside, Iraola was direct: “He has to enjoy this, because to score a hat-trick in the Champions League is always very difficult.”
The mayhem was by design — and that is the problem
Iraola’s Liverpool attacked in something close to a 3-1-6 shape, flooding bodies beyond the ball and generating 19 attempts in the first half alone. It produced an emphatic win and a 3.34 expected-goals figure. It also left LASK with 2.02 xG of their own, and that is the number that matters most in a sober reading of the evening. The Austrians scored three times by attacking the spaces Liverpool’s advancing full-backs had vacated, exactly as Manchester City had done at Anfield three days earlier.
That 0-3 defeat on 11 October — Ryan Gravenberch dismissed for a second yellow before Erling Haaland, Jeremy Doku and Rayan Cherki scored inside 16 minutes — is the proper context for this result. Liverpool are ninth in the Premier League. A 6-3 win over the Austrian champions does not reverse that; it simply confirms that Iraola’s team, barely four months into his two-year appointment as Arne Slot’s successor, can overwhelm opponents it should overwhelm while remaining open to opponents who punish risk.
A rebuilt squad, deliberately trusted
Iraola rested Virgil van Dijk and Alexis Mac Allister with Saturday’s trip to Brentford in mind, and started Koumas, Rio Ngumoha and Trey Nyoni. Koumas scored; Ngumoha’s directness was among the game’s more encouraging features. In a season in which Salah, Andy Robertson and Curtis Jones have all departed, those selections are not emergency measures but statements of intent from a coach whose Bournemouth sides were built on young players running hard in structured chaos.
“I think their confidence, for sure, is very good,” Iraola said of Barcola and Wirtz. “I think they feel that we trust them a lot.”
What it means from here
Liverpool now have six points from two league-phase matches, having beaten Atletico Madrid 2-1 at Anfield on 9 September, and sit fifth in the 36-team table. The schedule stiffens quickly:
- Brentford away in the Premier League on Saturday, with Van Dijk and Mac Allister restored
- Villarreal at Anfield on 20 October — the first genuine test of whether the attacking shape survives better opposition
- Fenerbahce away on 4 November, then Club Brugge and Porto before the turn of the year
The honest verdict is that Liverpool solved a problem and exposed another on the same night. Barcola’s goal drought is over, and with it a narrative that had begun to calcify around a club-record-level signing. But six goals scored and three conceded against LASK is a result that flatters and warns in equal measure. Villarreal on Tuesday will not be so accommodating, and a Liverpool side ninth in its own league cannot afford to keep treating defensive transitions as an acceptable cost of doing business.
Ahmad Ali is Sports Editor at SportsPortal.net.
Sports journalist and editor at SportsPortal.net. Covers cricket, football, Formula 1, tennis, and basketball with a focus on how global sports connect with Pakistani audiences. Follows the PSL, Pakistan national cricket team, Premier League, and major international tournaments. Has reported on sports for digital audiences since 2021.
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