Brighton started this game with two dangerous looking corners, the ball pinging around in Liverpool’s box between blue shirts making carefully rehearsed movements. In his little over a year since joining Brighton as manager, Roberto De Zerbi has put some impressive results on the table. This looked at first like it might be another, only to be stymmied by the Liverpool terminator, a team that refuses to die even when, as a fan, it has often left me this season wanting to stop watching the match and go into a feotal position in the corner.

For Liverpool, things are now getting serious. At this stage of the season, matchweek eight, with nearly a quarter of the games played, the shine has started to wear off their new signings. Now, it is all about team performances, getting results and getting them in the best style possible, preferably without defensive disasters.

Alexis Mac Allister, the world cup winner from Argentina, was signed from Brighton by Liverpool early on in the summer and started here his eighth match in the Premier League, undoubtedly looking to impress both his new and old manager. Those two appeared to have their own mini-drama, competing for who could look the most non-sartorial, Klopp wearing a cotton t-shirt in the 21 degree Brighton weather, while De Zerbi wore a standard, black, long sleeved sweater of considerably greater elegance, but offset with his hair spikes, as usual. We get it, Roberto, you’re a tactical master, but must you really take even this hair styling opportunity to establish yourself as the leading disciple of his fellow spiky-haired manager Xavi Hernandez, and everything Pep Guardiola?

Sadly, at this quarterpoint in the season, it has undoubtedly become established, for me at least, that Mac Allister struggles as a Liverpool defensive midfielder. He can look the opposite of a tidy player when receiving a ball under pressure, facing his goalkeeper, and in the twentieth minute he reacted like sludge to a backpass from Virgil Van Dijk, his central defender. The young (yet curiously old looking) Brighton player, Simon Adingra, snipped in to intercept the pass with great ease. Van Dijk watched it all happen, aghast, but could do nothing as Adingra advanced and hit a hard ball on the ground from distance into the left corner. It was a shot that Alisson would typically tend to save, but in this case, he couldn’t quite get there. Brighton - Liverpool, 1-0.

Aside from the goal, the game in this first half was largely stalemated. Liverpool missed the silky control and composure that Curtis Jones had been providing as a starting midfielder. The Brighton players packed the area just forward of Liverpool’s defenders, so that even with one of their fullbacks as a midfielder — another sign of the infectiousness of Pep Guardiola’s mind plague for all Premier League managers — the midfield looked an impossibly congested area. Nor was there space on the wings for Jurgen Klopp’s men to look out for. Mohamed Salah, always one of Liverpool’s most hard working players, was strangely stuck in limbo. Seemingly even the hardest workers can’t work very hard when they are given no chances to work for.

Yet, this season’s Liverpool team has established a record of persistent menace, even when behind in goals or down one man, two men, or of course, brain melting reversals of the most objective rules in professional football. (Let us not keep incessantly naming the ... well, fuck it, Simon Hooper’s Rosemary’s Baby, that worst nightmare for all video assistants of the future.) So it was that Mac Allister, at fault for the first goal, was the one who started a move in the fortieth minute to redeem himself. The Liverpool players finally managed to string balls rapidly, vertically through the center, Darwin Núñez finding Salah in the box for a simple finish. A few minutes later, Dominik Szoboszlai made a rare foray into Brighton’s box where he was fortunate to get tugged down by Pascal Gross, who had been otherwise excellent. 2-1 for Liverpool, a stark reversal.

The second half would see the Liverpool player Ryan Gravenberch come on for Elliott and tweaks in both manager’s systems, seeking to free themselves of each other. The midfield no longer looked as congested and Mac Allister looked to have regained conviction. There is no doubt the former Brighton player can read the game, see a pass, and be decisive, especially in the game’s attacking phases. However, near the eightieth minute he once again made a defensive error, letting a Solly March free kick from outside the left of the box soar right in front of his face to get smashed in by Lewis Dunk, well positioned dead center.

The play now all looked much more even. Both teams had adjusted to empower their star players, Salah beginning to look much more involved, while Kaoru Mitoma proved to everyone watching that he is undoubtedly Brighton’s best player. At one point he received the ball on the wing from a Brighton center back, taking a casual touch facing backwards, only to fall into a near instantaneous hurtle goalwards, leaving the substitute right back, Joe Gomez, who is pacy enough in his own right, less like a substitute, and more like a ghost of Trent Alexander-Arnold.

Without the Englishman’s innovation, Liverpool were looking less and less threatening and struggled to apply any sustained pressure. Diaz missed a half-chance, Gravenberch hit a post, but Brighton had their own chances, with their fans incensed at a ball that popped up off Van Dijk’s knee and onto his arm.

“Why?” shouted De Zerbi at the on-field referee and then the fourth official, getting yellow carded. Why indeed, Klopp seemed to say to him, giving him a friendly touch around his shoulders, letting his grin blind the upper rafters. There are much worse things to complain about, Klopp would have been thinking. No matter. The game remains the beautiful game, and Tony Bloom’s Infinite Assembly Line continues to chug onwards.