He worried his Liverpool opportunity might be lost…
Alisson was in the AS Roma side that travelled to Anfield to face the Reds in the first leg of the Champions League semi-finals in April 2018.
At the time, he was aware of speculation that Liverpool could try to sign him that summer.
So, a 5-2 defeat for the visitors that night not only damaged Roma’s chances of advancing to the final but, in his mind, Alisson’s prospects of becoming a Red.
He details: “There were some rumours about Liverpool being interested in me. Nothing too serious but as a player you start to imagine, ‘Is a big club maybe coming for me in the summer? Maybe an opportunity? So I have to go there and give my best.’
“Then you lose 5-2 and think, ‘It’s gone!’”
Regardless, Kopites had made such an impression on Alisson that he decided then that if Liverpool did make an approach, it would certainly be the club for him.
“The noise was so loud, it gets inside your head,” he continues. “The way the supporters were pushing the team forward, it was impossible that night that we – Roma – would win the game.
“It was nice as well to feel that because of the rumours, the supporters started to wish that I come to play for Liverpool. At the second half, when I changed sides to play at the Kop, a few supporters clapped me and I felt, ‘OK, maybe they want me to come.’
“It was special and at that moment I said, ‘If this club comes to me, it’s definitely a yes.’”
‘We were like kids in a candy shop’…
The switch to Merseyside did, of course, materialise just a few months later.
Identified as the man to be Liverpool’s long-term goalkeeper, Alisson needed only one training session with his new team to show the wisdom of the club’s decision.
Jürgen Klopp, then-Reds manager, reveals: “When he arrived, I remember his first session was in Evian, he joined us in the training camp.
“We did a little shooting exercise and it was like four or five times he made a few saves and we were like, ‘What?!’ Like, shots from 10 or 12 yards to the far corner and he was just, whoosh! ‘Oh, that’s possible? Great!’
“We were a bit like kids in a candy shop with, ‘Oh, what did we get here?!’”
He felt invincible in Madrid…
Alisson’s debut season at Liverpool ended with the Champions League trophy being hoisted above his head at Estadio Metropolitano.
A key figure throughout the Reds’ journey to that showpiece clash with Tottenham Hotspur in June 2019, he was in impenetrable form in the final too, providing a string of excellent saves as Klopp’s men won 2-0.
He remembers: “I always say that I never wanted that match to finish but the guys said, ‘Yeah, but then you don’t win the game, you don’t win the trophy, never!’
“But it’s because I enjoyed so much that game and I had the feeling I would never concede in that game, because of the way the team was playing and because of my mood as well.
“Making the saves, having the chances, creating the chances, the atmosphere at the stadium… what a night. I enjoyed every minute of that game.”
What YNWA means to him…
“The message that the song has, I didn’t realise at the beginning but after when I looked at the lyrics, it’s really special,” Alisson says of the club’s anthem.
“The way Liverpool, [those] surrounding the club, supporters, people that work at the club, the way they live their lives, they live in the style of You’ll Never Walk Alone. They help each other, they don’t look only for themselves, they really mean it when they sing the song and that makes it even more special, because it’s not only a song.
“And I experienced that when I lost my dad. It was a perfect song for me and my family, that I was never walking alone, no matter what – even in the good times or in the bad times.
“This is something that you take for your life.”
The impossible celebration…
So much has been said and written already about May 16, 2021, the day Alisson became the first Liverpool ’keeper ever to score a goal.
Not just any goal either. A 95th-minute headed winner away at West Bromwich Albion that was crucial to the Reds’ Champions League qualification hopes for that season.
