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Newcastle United 2-3 Liverpool was a game filled with drama, goals and talking points. But former Sky Sports presenter Richard Keys believes fans are being "robbed" after a statistic emerged from the clash.
Liverpool went two goals ahead thanks to strikes from Ryan Gravenberch and Hugo Ekitike before Newcastle pulled level through Bruno Guimaraes and Will Osula. Rio Ngumoha then popped up at the far post to fire a shot into the corner past Nick Pope.
However, Keys felt that the ball wasn't in play for long enough. While there were 11 minutes added to the second half in stoppage time, he has called for a rule update to prevent time-wasting.
"So a match that ran to 100+ minutes saw a ball in play time of just 40.8 per cent — the lowest in a Premier League match for 15 years," Keys posted on social media. "Fans are being robbed. We should play to a 60-minute ball-in-play clock."
While such a rule change would mean that games are all of equal length and the ball is in play for the same period of time, there is no guarantee that it would stop time-wasting.
Indeed, players might be emboldened to slow things down even more to disrupt the opposition, as they would know they could argue that the length of the game is unaltered.
While Liverpool was unable to play attacking, free-flowing stuff — aside from the late winner, which was very well-worked — Arne Slot felt that it was an entertaining game.
"How do you sum an evening like this up?" he asked in his post-match press conference. "It felt familiar to me; I think I have experienced a game like this once before since I'm here in England — that was Everton away last season.
"Where so many things happened, where it was complete chaos, where the fans were so loud and so there for the home team and our fans tried to help us as much as they could.
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"It was an unbelievable atmosphere and for us to stay strong in that atmosphere for such a long time is worth more to me than when we play every single time out from the back and we have a four or five-nil win.
"These wins, these mean more to me than when we play good football because tonight had, for me, nothing to do with tactics or good football.
"It was a great game to watch but not because of tactics or good football. But because for every single second of the game everybody was on the front of their seat."
Liverpool.com says: Keys does have a point in some games, but this wasn't the best one to make the argument in. The evening at St James' Park was frenetic and intense, and was a great watch for the neutral.
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