Andoni Iraola ‘could feel’ that Bradley Barcola had a big performance coming in the day prior to Liverpool’s 6-3 win over LASK in the Champions League.The £106m signing from Paris Saint-Germain hadn’t scored in any of his first six games for the Reds, but the famine turned into a feat in Austria as the 24-year-old helped himself to a hat-trick.The treble has immediately catapulted the Frenchman to joint-second in the LFC goalscoring charts for this season, with only Alexander Isak (four) bettering his tally.Iraola ‘could feel’ a big night coming for BarcolaSpeaking after the victory over LASK, Iraola claimed that he had a feeling from Liverpool’s training session on Tuesday that Barcola was primed for lift-off.The Reds’ head coach said (via liverpoolfc.com): “Obviously I think he has to enjoy this because to score a hat-trick in the Champions League is always very difficult.“I think even [in] training yesterday, I could feel he was very lively – sometimes you feel these things. You never know how he’s going to play the next day, but it wasn’t like a big surprise because we were feeling he was in a good place for the game.”(Photo by Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images)Want more Empire of the Kop coverage? Add us as a preferred source on Google to your favourites list for news you can trustWill this now be lift-off for Barcola at Liverpool?It might seem easy for Iraola to say that in hindsight, but we’ll take the Basque at his word, especially when seeing how deadly Barcola was against LASK.Let’s just say he didn’t look like a forward with a crisis of confidence or weighed down by the wait for a goal for Liverpool, with the quality of his finishing a joy to behold.As Ian Doyle noted for the Liverpool Echo, the 24-year-old ‘looked dangerous every time he had the ball’, adding: ‘This is why Liverpool paid the big bucks.’Barcola will now be determined to show that his hat-trick tonight will be a starting point towards a prolific season for the Reds, rather than an outlying fixture in which a large percentage of his goals for 2026/27 were scored.The Frenchman will surely be buzzing as he returns to Merseyside with his teammates, and hopefully he can pick up where he left off by finding the net against Brentford on Saturday as he awaits his first Premier League goal.The post What Andoni Iraola noticed from Bradley Barcola in training on Tuesday proved quite prophetic appeared first on The Empire of The Kop.