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Former Liverpool striker Robbie Fowler says Arne Slot's side is heading in the right direction again after it followed up a win over Aston Villa in the Premier League with a 1-0 victory against Real Madrid.
Alexis Mac Allister scored the only goal of the game in the Champions League glamor tie with the Argentine heading past Thibaut Courtois just after the hour mark. And the Reds kept a second clean sheet of the week, looking solid at the back with Conor Bradley, in particular, impressing.
"The last couple of performances says they are [back] or certainly on the right track anyway," Fowler said on Amazon Prime. "As champions, teams are going to come here and raise their game. They will try that little bit more to get a result."
"When you are the champions and go and lose two or three games in a row, you expect to get criticized," Wayne Rooney added.
"What we are seeing is a solidarity between the players. What we saw tonight was Liverpool of last season. I am sure this was a blueprint for them moving forward."
Florian Wirtz played off the left, and that allowed Arne Slot to retain his solid midfield trio of Mac Allister, Dominik Szoboszlai, and Alexis Mac Allister.
That could be the way forward for Liverpool, though there is also Alexander Isak to fit into the attack. Hugo Ekitike was very good again here, and Cody Gakpo and Federico Chiesa both emerged from the bench.
"Impressive, because we played against an incredible side, a team that is in an unbelievable run of form — only lost once, won all the other games," Slot said in his post-match press conference.
"If you then can win against them, but also with the performance we had, that's very positive. But apart from everything, we can say, we beat them because of a set-piece.
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"It's nicer to talk about this if you win because if you lose, people come up with that I try to find excuses. But a positive set-piece balance is the minimum you need to get a result nine out of 10 times, and that's what we had today.
"Let's be clear: we had a very bad run of form in terms of results. No excuse in the world can make up for us losing so many games.
"But we had to play a lot of games in a small amount of time, with hardly any rest in between when we then faced a team that had a lot of rest. Tonight we played against a team that played on Saturday as well, so the both of us had two days' rest.
"Then it's helpful to play a home game, because from the last eight, I think we played six away from home. The fans can give you just a little bit of an extra edge if you are a little bit tired."
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