Anfield was almost empty. Stewards ushered the last fans to the stairwells. Cleaners swept the aisles. TV crews packed up what was left of their equipment. A father and son walked past the dugouts. They wanted to go see the Kop. A deserted Kop but the Kop all the same.
Luca Percassi put his arm around his boy and pulled him in for a hug. Percassi’s father, Antonio, played for Atalanta in the 70s. Luca has stayed on as chief executive since they sold a majority stake in the club to Steve Pagliuca, the chairperson of Bain Capital and co-owner of the Boston Celtics, a couple of years ago. His boy, the third generation of Percassis, has been spoilt as an Atalanta fan. “It’s something unique, something extraordinary,” Luca said before kick-off.
Other Italian teams have won at Anfield. Genoa were the first in the forerunner of this competition, the UEFA Cup, in 1992 with an avatar of Gian Piero Gasperini on the bench, Osvaldo Bagnoli. Inter Milan left this side of Stanley Park victorious but eliminated from the Champions League two years ago. Results like that were one-offs. Tales for the grandkids. The smile-it-might-never-happen-again moments of a football life. And yet Atalanta, improbably, did it again.
After beating Liverpool on Merseyside during covid-19 in the Champions League group stages, they achieved the unprecedented and, almost four years later, went back-to-back. So much has changed in the meantime. Seven of the XI that won at Anfield in 2020 have left. The goalscorers from that night, Josip Ilicic and Robin Gosens, have arguably been the toughest players to replace. It was, by most metrics (points accumulated and goals scored), the best Atalanta team of all-time. Thursday’s team effort, however, was something else.
“It has an altogether different taste to it,” Gasperini said.
The last side to win 3-0 away at Anfield in Europe was Real Madrid. It was pre-Jurgen Klopp and almost a decade ago, a far less formidable Liverpool side than the one Atalanta faced last night. There was Simon Mignolet, Joe Allen, Alberto Moreno and Mario Balotelli, not Virgil van Dijk, World Cup-winner Alexis MacAllister and €85million Darwin Nunez. The subs were Adam Lallana and Lazar Markovic, not Mohamed Salah, Luis Diaz and Dominik Szoboszlai.
Atalanta were not, on paper, at full-strength either. Marco Carnesecchi, Gasperini’s first-choice goalkeeper, has sat out Europa League games in order to give the error-prone Juan Musso, an expensive signing by Atalanta standards, some playing time. The Atalanta manager also had to do without arguably his best centre-back Giorgio Scalvini and lost Saed Kolasinac to injury the night before the game.
None of it mattered.
While Atalanta were lucky, at times, not to concede, such as when Harvey Elliott hit the bar and Nunez missed one opportunity after another, the scoreline didn’t flatter them. The first chance of the game had fallen to Mario Pasalic and it was a mystery how Teun Koopmeiners, Atalanta’s total footballing midfielder and top scorer this season, didn’t make more of a couple of one-v-ones either side of half-time. On another night, it could have been like that famous 4-3 win against Valencia at Mestalla in 2020, a night when Ilicic played like a Ballon d’Or candidate. This victory was more prestigious.
Atalanta Mario Pasalic revels in scoring Atalanta’s third goal (Darren Staples/AFP via Getty Images)
But was it a surprise? On one level, of course. Liverpool had not lost at Anfield all season. They had overcome their injury crisis, Klopp’s unused subs (Trent Alexander-Arnold and Ryan Gravenberch) showed the hosts’ depth and unlike when Atalanta last won here, the gates to Anfield were not locked on account of the pandemic. It was a full house.
In that context, Atalanta’s win caused a degree of astonishment. But Gasperini has normalised the extraordinary. In the 84 years before he became coach of this club, Atalanta competed in Europe three times (even making the Cup Winners’ Cup semis as a Serie B side in 1988). They have since qualified in all but one of his eight seasons in charge. Not only have Atalanta triumphed over Liverpool at Anfield (twice), they upset Erik ten Hag’s Ajax in Amsterdam and came within seconds of a Champions League semi-final in 2020. One-nil up and with all his subs gone, Gasp was powerless as Paris Saint-Germain scored twice in stoppage time against a team forced to play with 10 men following Remo Freuler’s injury.
Memories like those made Thursday night are now less of a shock but only a little. Once upon a time, Atalanta were a club that yo-yoed between Serie A and Serie B. That feels like an awful long time ago now. Gasperini got Atalanta into Europe for the first time since 1991 and it has become the rule rather than exception. He took the club to its first Coppa Italia final in 23 years, made it back again and could make another one this season. All he’s missing is a trophy. He has built and sold off, then built and sold off three different Atalanta teams and while Thursday’s triumph might be different in personnel from the one that won at Anfield in 2020, it was not in philosophy.
Under Gasperini, Atalanta have always been bold. They’ve taken risks, playing on the front foot and going man-to-man all over the pitch. He has, in the past, been criticised for not adopting a more measured approach. But look where this approach has got him. New frontiers. Unchartered territory.
Still undefeated in the Europa League this season, Atalanta have beaten Liverpool’s present and maybe their future too. They beat Ruben Amorim’s Sporting home and away. The mercurial Gianluca Scamacca scored in both games against the Portuguese leaders. Left out of the last national team squad in March, if Luciano Spalletti’s intention was to provoke a reaction, he has well and truly got one. That’s now six goals in his last six appearances.
Scamacca’s brace on Thursday was history in and of itself. No Italian player has ever left Anfield with one. “It isn’t any kind of revenge,” he insisted, amid the widespread assumption Scamacca was the player Spalletti alluded to when he criticised modern footballers in an interview with Gazzetta dello Sport. “You come on international duty to win the Euros, not Call of Duty,” Spalletti told the pink. “If modern football is playing PlayStation until four in the morning when there’s a game the next day, then modern football isn’t good.”
Whether Scamacca can keep this up until the end of the season — the goalscoring, not the Call of Duty — and show the consistency his career has so far lacked remains to be seen. “Often, he plays in moments,” Gasperini said. “He can have a very good opening 15 minutes, switch off, lose a bit of confidence, drift out of the game, and isn’t the same player. Today he played for the full 90 minutes, maybe for the first time. Only that way can he become a top player.”
Scamacca embodied everything that was great about Atalanta at Anfield. The focus fell on his composed finishing but he was physical as well as skilful, Premier League in profile, like so many of Atalanta’s players. Marten de Roon, a coach on the pitch, was tactically magnificent filling in at left centre-back. Ederson and Pasalic covered ground like a pair of Pac-Men. At half-time, it felt like Atalanta had run enough for 90 minutes in 45. But they kept going and Gasperini, in the end, only made one substitution, replacing Charles De Ketelaere with Aleksei Miranchuk in the dying seconds.
Gianluca Scamacca scores Atalanta’s second goal of the night (Darren Staples/AFP via Getty Images)
“I didn’t want to touch anything,” he said. “I was afraid to because the guys were still doing fine. Maybe it was down to the result but we were playing with enthusiasm and seemed less fatigued than at certain other points in the game. We were braver than in recent games. There was the desire to get after them and press all over the pitch. We knew it was a bit of a risk but that we could also cause them problems.”
Pep Guardiola once said playing Gasperini’s Atalanta is like going to the dentist. Jurgen Klopp laughed on the eve of the game when the Sky Italia journalist Gianluigi Bagnulo put it to him that, in light of the work he’s had done on his smile, he wasn’t afraid of the drills and sharp instruments. But Klopp was no longer smiling at full-time at Anfield, or at least his grin didn’t match those in the away end. While one supporter reached for the anorak Gasperini tossed to the crowd as a memento, another held a banner for “those who couldn’t be there”. They didn’t know what they were missing.
It felt particularly poignant.
Atalanta’s Champions League runs in 2019-20 and 2020-21 started with them playing at San Siro rather than the Gewiss Stadium. Bergamo then became ground zero for the pandemic in Europe, the photos of trucks parked outside a local hospital to take away the dead put football in perspective. When the games returned, they were played behind closed doors. The fans didn’t get to see the team’s heroics in person.
In modern football, as teams of Atalanta’s size live under the shadows of vultures ready to swoop in for their best players, it was fair to wonder whether they’d ever have another chance to go watch their boys at Anfield, let alone win there again. No Italian team had ever done it before. To see Atalanta do it again was the experience of a lifetime.
That’s why Thursday was so special. “This is happiness,” Gasperini said.
(Top photo: Darren Staples/AFP via Getty Images)
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