Isak Shines in Iraola's First Liverpool Win Over Ipswich
Andoni Iraola did not have to wait long this time. At Bournemouth it took 10 games. At Liverpool, it took nine minutes.
Two ruthless finishes from Alexander Isak, both inside that frantic early spell, delivered a 2-0 win at Portman Road and the first victory of the Spaniard’s reign. Ipswich never quite recovered from the opening storm, and their goalkeeper will relive it for a while yet.
Lightning start, fragile gloves
Liverpool arrived with murmurs already growing about Iraola’s slow starts. Two draws to open the season had triggered flashbacks to his rocky first weeks on the south coast. Any tension evaporated almost instantly.
On six minutes, Cody Gakpo slid a perfectly weighted pass into Isak’s path. The Swede hit it hard but straight; Kjell Scherpen got both hands to it and still watched the ball burst through his palms and into the net. A soft concession, punished without mercy.
Ipswich were rattled. Three minutes later, they imploded again.
A hopeful long ball turned into a crisis as Scherpen charged out, misjudged everything and left his goal exposed. Isak needed no second invitation, angling a low finish beyond the stranded keeper from the left. Two shots, two goals, two glaring questions about the man in Ipswich’s No 1 shirt.
Gakpo, electric again in Iraola’s aggressive set-up, walked away with two assists and the look of a player thriving under new demands.
Ipswich steady, Liverpool shut it down
From there, Liverpool changed gear. The early chaos gave way to control.
Ipswich, to their credit, did not fold. Leif Davis glanced a header wide on the half-hour as Liverpool briefly lost their defensive shape. The home crowd roared their team back into the contest, and for a spell Gary O’Neil’s side matched Liverpool stride for stride.
Isak thought he had completed a first-half hat-trick, meeting a superb Florian Wirtz cross, only to see the flag go up. The timing was off by a fraction; the finishing was not.
After the break, Iraola’s side became more pragmatic. The press remained sharp, but the risk-taking eased. Liverpool protected what they had, and this time they did it with a discipline that has not always come easily to them in recent seasons.
Bradley Barcola’s arrival on 66 minutes underlined the new era. A £123m signing from PSG, introduced into a game already under control, he was given a gentle Premier League debut rather than thrown into a rescue mission. Liverpool’s first clean sheet under Iraola wrapped the night in a neat, professional bow.
“I needed this one,” Iraola admitted afterwards, pleased with the control and the high pressing that repeatedly put Isak into dangerous positions.
Controversy and curses
Portman Road did not leave quietly. The home support had two major grievances.
First came the Jérémy Jacquet incident. Already booked for a foul on Emersonn, the Liverpool defender lunged in from behind again early in the second half. Ipswich waited for the whistle and the second yellow. Nothing. Not even a foul. The noise around Darren England spiked.
Then came the Liverpool penalty that wasn’t. VAR spotted a foul by Davis on Dominik Szoboszlai and sent England to the monitor. The decision looked set to bury Ipswich, but the intervention from Stockley Park went the other way: Szoboszlai had strayed offside in the build-up. No penalty, and a rare cheer for the technology from the home stands.
O’Neil’s frustration lay elsewhere. He felt Liverpool were allowed to run down the clock with a freedom his own side had not enjoyed at Old Trafford.
“They were able to kill the game a lot easier here,” he said, arguing his goalkeeper had been hurried in previous weeks while Liverpool were not. He accepted the VAR call on the penalty, but not the pace of Liverpool’s time management.
Behind all that, though, lurked the issue Ipswich cannot escape: the goalkeeper position.
Scherpen’s first-half display will only deepen the sense of unease. Ipswich thought they had reset the position after Arijanet Muric’s error-strewn campaign last time they were promoted. Instead, the script felt painfully familiar.
Two mistakes, two goals, and a match plan shredded before it had a chance to breathe. At this level, one misjudgment is costly. Two inside nine minutes is fatal.
Ipswich need Scherpen to settle fast. They cannot afford to be fighting the opposition and their own nerves every time the ball goes near their six-yard box. After Muric and now this, it is no wonder the Portman Road crowd talk about a curse on the No 1 shirt.
Isak resets, Liverpool reset
For Isak, this felt like a line in the sand. A long injury, a disrupted season, doubts creeping in. He spoke openly about wanting a strong World Cup and a clean start to this campaign. Two goals here, a disallowed third, and 90 minutes of menace suggest he is getting exactly that.
“That season is kind of behind me,” he said, relieved more than euphoric.
Iraola’s demands of him go beyond the scoresheet. The head coach talked about “fights” with his striker over the defensive work, the pressing, the runs that open space for others. On nights like this, when Liverpool win the ball high and feed him early, Isak looks every inch the “massive player” his manager called him.
Ipswich, beaten but not broken, left the pitch to applause. They had recovered from a nightmare start to give Liverpool an honest game, and O’Neil will cling to that response. But the table will not show the nuance. It will show two straight defeats and a familiar set of questions about what happens when the pressure reaches their goalkeeper.
Liverpool, by contrast, walk away with exactly what they needed: a first win, a first clean sheet, their new £123m winger blooded, and their No 9 firing again.
The slow-burn narrative that stalked Iraola at Bournemouth has been cut off early. Now the real question starts: how high, and how fast, can this version of Liverpool climb?
