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Liverpool left it very, very late to secure the points against Leicester City at Anfield on Saturday. With 92:17 on the clock, Sadio Mané was fouled in the box. The penalty was confirmed by VAR at 93:40, and the ball hit the back of the net at 94:31, in a match scheduled to have four additional minutes. It couldn’t have been much closer.

If you’ve got a high pressure penalty, you want James Milner to take it. The veteran has scored Liverpool’s last three winners which came from the spot, with each of them coming in the 81st minute at the earliest.

Milner slotted home a late match-settling penalty at Craven Cottage in the second game of Liverpool’s current record breaking 17-match winning streak. Prior to that, he netted an 84th minute spot kick at Swansea in October 2016 when the Reds came from behind to take the points. Three late penalties, three 2-1 wins.

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But for the sake of argument, let’s say the spot-kick wasn’t awarded. Let’s say the high priests of punditry on Match Of The Day were correct, that it’s a contact sport and so contact in the box isn’t worthy of a penalty.

Let’s assume the match had ended 1-1 and Liverpool had only made the joint-seventh best start to a season in Premier League history, rather than the second best (as the Chelsea side of 2005/06 had eight wins and a goal difference of 16 at this point). If that had been the outcome, would Leicester have deserved a draw?

Not a bit of it.

Leicester really struggled to live with the Reds throughout. Liverpool completed 17 take-ons in this match, at least six more than in any every league game this term, and their joint-most in any since the start of 2018/19.

The other match where they made 17 successful dribbles – the 5-0 win over Watford at Anfield – saw them attempt 13 more than they did on Saturday, making the Leicester game Liverpool’s most effective, efficient dribbling performance for quite some time.

Roberto Firmino was the tormentor in chief, as he completed four take-ons, but in total eight Reds went past an opponent with the ball at least once.

The most important dribble belonged to Divock Origi, who received the only pass of Adam Lallana’s cameo, took the ball past Ricardo Pereira and drove towards the box where Mané was ultimately fouled. The two late substitutes made small but vital contributions to Liverpool’s victory.

And when the dribbles were not successful, the home side were often taken down by unfair means. The Foxes were forced into making a total of 17 fouls, for the first time in 28 league games. They last committed more infringements 30 games prior to that.

The net result was that they received four bookings, which was twice as many as the number of goal attempts they had. Leicester were chasing shadows at times on Saturday.

But if we really want to determine if the visitors deserved a point, we need to look at the shots both sides had. Prior to the penalty, Liverpool had already had five clear-cut chances, just as they did in midweek against Salzburg.

The difference was that against the Austrian champions they converted four out of five, but here it was only one. Scoring five out of the ten in total from the last two games is above average – converting around one in three is par – but of course you can’t choose when the successful ones occur.

(Image: Liverpool FC via Getty Images)

We can also assess each team’s chance quality using expected goals (‘xG’), a system which assigns a value to each shot based on the historic conversion rates of similar opportunities.

FiveThirtyEight scored the chances from this match at 4.4 expected goals to Liverpool and 0.1 to Leicester, which (while certainly not definitive) suggests that a 4-0 home win might have been a fairer outcome.

But we’re choosing to ignore the penalty out of interest, don’t forget. Even if we subtract Milner’s winner from Liverpool’s xG score, this game was still in FiveThirtyEight’s 130 most one sided matches in their database of over 14,000 games from 18 different leagues across the last three years. Include the penalty, because it was a penalty, and this game is ranked 36th for a team most deserving to win.

And this was after only two days rest following a rollercoaster European match, against the club who went into the game third in the league. A team who had prior to kick-off conceded the fewest clear-cut chances in the Premier League this season. Liverpool literally doubled Leicester’s tally for 2019/20 with their efforts here.

So convince yourself it wasn’t a penalty if you must, pundits and rival fans alike. It doesn’t change the fact that the Reds undoubtedly deserved to take all three points on Saturday. They deserved it more than pretty much any team in any league will deserve to win this season.