ONLY the very best teams are appreciated in the present. It’s easy to point to a group of players who will be a team of the future (say, Crystal Palace in the early 80s, Leeds in the early 2000s) and it’s even easy to look back at a team who were maybe unappreciated at the time but turned out were pretty effective (Manchester United in the early 2010s maybe) but realising you are witnessing a generational team in action in real time is a much rarer experience.
There were points when Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal achieved this, in some ways most often in the autumn of 2004, when the Invincibles era was shining at its brightest, like a dying star about to expand as an inherent part of its own inevitable demise. Games like the 5-3 win against Middlesbrough at Highbury, when the visitors, boasting a line up including Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, Gaizka Mendieta and the recently acquired Ray Parlour, went 3-1 up. Arsenal, looking to equal Nottingham Forest’s English record of 42 league games unbeaten, didn’t sweat it for a second, they just turned the intensity up a few clicks and won the game 5-3. Anyone watching the game on the day knew what they were seeing: a team existing in the exact moment of their own brilliance.
Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool have also achieved this state of present-tense grace. Most of the first half of the 2019-20 Premier League campaign was filled with them, with the 4-0 win at Leicester on Boxing Day being the most obvious. There were moments in that game when the interplay between Liverpool’s full-backs and their front three was transcendent. It was the moment the club’s 30 year wait for a league title spiritually ended. From that moment on it was just a matter of waiting for confirmation.
And yet the problem with ephemeral moments of greatness is that, logically, no team can maintain them for long. That Leicester game is less than 14 months ago yet it feels like a different team and a very different time. Liverpool’s heralded front three are all aging at the statutory rate (although what does that mean anymore in lockdown), meaning that by the middle of next year Roberto Firmino, Sadio Mane and Mohamed Salah will all be in their 30s. [DID YOU KNOW: Xherdan Shaqiri is younger than both Firmino and Kevin De Bruyne? You do now]. Diogo Jota’s fast start and subsequent injury only serves to highlight the problem Klopp now has, as his attack stutters properly for the first time.
Here’s the thing: Liverpool’s first five Premier League home games of the season were business as usual, with the Reds creating 21 Opta-defined big chances (the sort of opportunities you’d expect a team to score at least 50% of the time), scoring 10 of them. The fifth game was a 3-0 win against Leicester in November, and while not as dominant a display as the one they had produced at the King Power Stadium the 11 months earlier, the issues the champions were about to face at Anfield were not on anyone’s radar. Since that game, though, Liverpool have created eight clear cut chances in six home games, just one more than they managed in the Leicester match alone. Even worse, only one of the last six has been converted into a goal, which also happens to be the last goal Liverpool scored at Anfield in the Premier League, against West Brom in December.
The real-world impact on Liverpool is that their current drought at home is the club’s worst since the Joe Fagan era in 1984. The club have never gone four home league games without a goal in their entire history, so it doesn’t feel like an ideal time to play Manchester City at home, and yet City at Anfield is invariably one of Liverpool’s more reliable fixtures, only losing one of their last 29 against them on Merseyside. Klopp’s team also won’t need to worry about wasting big chances either, as Pep Guardiola’s new look defence is now so effective they are giving up only 0.48 of them per game this season, a huge improvement from the almost one per game they allowed last season, a trend that essentially pulled them out of the title race. City are back…but that means they are now the team with something to lose.
Because this is just the sort of game that suits Liverpool right now. They don’t need to worry about protecting a long unbeaten run, they don’t need to worry about dropping points, as they’ve been doing that to virtually everyone and they don’t need to worry about wasting big chances because they probably won’t get any. Instead they should relax, enjoy themselves and try and find that state of grace one more time. Roll back the years to create hope for the future.
