Liverpool FC 2-2 Nottingham Forest FC: Premier League Match Report, 29 August 2026

For the second Sunday running Liverpool conceded first and finished level. Liverpool FC 2-2 Nottingham Forest FC at Anfield, trailing 1-0 at the interval, two goals recovered after it, and a second consecutive 2-2 after the same scoreline at Newcastle a week earlier.

Two matches are not a pattern, but the four goals conceded in them sit awkwardly beside last season's 53 — the highest total of any side in the top five and the number that turned a 63-goal attack into a fifth-place finish on 60 points. Conceding the opening goal in consecutive matches, one away and one at home, is at minimum consistent with the weakness the 2025/26 record already identified.

Forest's half of it deserves the same care. They arrived on the back of a 1-0 home defeat to Leeds, a match still goalless at the break, and left Anfield having led at half-time and taken a point from a ground where they won 3-0 last November. Sixteenth on 44 points last season, with sixteen defeats from 38, is the profile of a side that gets beaten in a wide range of circumstances — and yet this is the second time inside ten months that they have gone to Anfield and not been beaten.

The recovery is what stops the reading tipping too far. Liverpool were behind twice in eight days and dropped four points rather than six, which is the difference between a slow start and a bad one.

Two points from two matches for Liverpool, both draws, both after conceding first. That is a start below what a side with 60 points and fifth place behind them would want, but round two settles nothing: the club that finished fifth last season lost twelve league matches and still finished three points clear of sixth.

For Forest it is a first point of the campaign and the more valuable of the two results in context. A team that lost sixteen times last season taking something at Anfield is worth more to them than the fixture list suggested it would be, particularly after opening with a home defeat to a side that finished fourteenth.

The sixteen-point gap that separated these clubs in May remains the best available guide to which is the better side. Two rounds have not touched it. What they have done is confirm that this specific fixture, at this specific ground, has stopped behaving the way the table says it should.

Our pre-match call was Double Chance 1X (Liverpool FC or Draw) at 1.25. It won, on the half of the market that exists to absorb exactly this.

The reasoning held up in outline and not in detail. Sixteen points, thirteen goals of difference and Forest's sixteen defeats all argued that Liverpool would avoid losing, and they did. But the case assumed the home win was the likely route and the draw the safety net, and the match ran the other way round — Forest led at half-time, and Liverpool needed a two-goal second half to reach the outcome we were paid for.

We flagged the 3-0 from last November and the 53 goals conceded as the risk. Both showed up. At 1.25 a win is a win, and this one used the whole width of the selection.

Verdict: won