Liverpool's new Brazilian goalkeeper will surely have felt the chill of Saturday evening spent in West Yorkshire but a 1-0 win and another clean sheet will surely have warmed Alisson Becker on the trip back to Merseyside.
It marks the former Roma goalkeeper’s sixth clean sheet in his first nine Premier League games, of all his competition in the goalkeeping fraternity, only Petr Cech made a better start to his Premier League career, when keeping eight in the Chelsea nets back in the 2004/05 season.
A remarkable statistic that is, and but for an ill-advised cruyff turn against Leicester City, it would read even better for Alisson.
In those three games in which his copybook was indeed blotted, he only conceded one goal in each, meaning that the club moves past the nine games played mark in the league with the best defensive record of its 126-year history.
His efforts haven’t gone unnoticed by the typically excitable Liverpool community on social media...
@Andrew_Heaton kicking things off with an unusually reserved bit of input: “Alisson Becker is quite good.”
@siphenormous wanting to take things to another level: “Alisson Becker is not far from Ter Stegen you know.”
@FtblNine was the one to kick of the usual spats with the old enemy: “Best keeper in the league none of this de gea nonsense.”
But manager Jurgen Klopp has been keen to spread the kudos for a much improved defensive display - they had conceded 15 at the same stage last season - around the team.
“We don’t concede a lot of shots in general. It’s not that we don’t concede because Alisson [Becker] makes one world-class save after another. We don’t let them shoot often and that’s the best thing,” he told the club’s website in the build-up to yesterday’s tie.
It’s not as if the members of that defense haven’t got their own personal backslaps for their form, with Virgil Van Dijk even being put forward as the third-best player in the world by one pundit.
The visit of goal-shy Cardiff City to Anfield next weekend offers another opportunity to continue a stingy run of form for the red’s popular new stopper and his backline.