It’s funny really, last season I was resigned to the fact that Liverpool would be title challengers for the next few years if not longer.
But hindsight is a wonderful thing, and I now think they’ve truly bottled it.
They threw absolutely everything towards last season’s title and the UCL before that. Purposefully disregarding cups, spending hundreds of millions on players in their prime (despite age and limited resale value), flogging the same XI for two seasons, and completely failing to plan for the future, instead buying players like Origi and Minamino, and keeping an injured Ox on the sidelines.
Add to that: everything their fan base did to edge them over the line (e.g. bus wrecking), the sickening media support, the compulsive diving, the VAR decisions, COVID, hacking, and sheer luck.
And what do you get? In all their short sighted desperation, something that increasingly looks like a one-off PL title. Not the sort of domestic dominance they’d want you to believe.
It’s almost unbelievable how much they’ve declined. There were no signs at all that they would plummet. They were head and shoulders better than everyone else last season, and we looked on the decline (we looked slower, like something had been sucked out of us and like that great team of the last decade was coming to its end).
They aren’t particularly technical to watch with the ball, quite simple football really. But the balance of their attack from their full backs and front three was dangerous as fuck, all they needed in midfield between that was legs and energy.
Their decline is hard to fathom. It’s got nothing to do with defensive injuries because Gomez and Matip were injured for long spells of the previous two seasons and van Dijk played in the 7-2 hammering at Villa when things had already started to show signs of going wrong.
It’s something else.
One thing I’ve always noticed the season after we’ve won the league is how much harder other teams “try” against us. There’s definitely a difference between playing against one of the top sides to playing against the champions. To get the champions’ scalp is the biggest thing a lot of these other sides will ever achieve, and it is a big thing, that’s why they celebrate like they’ve won the league at the final whistle when they’ve beaten us as champions over the years. It’s like the team sport version of getting a PB in athletics.
I don’t think Liverpool’s players have coped with that very well at all. Teams are matching them for energy because they’re the champions and their simple football tactics aren’t overriding that.
I think it’s showing that they were better than everyone else last season and
almost better than everyone else the season before because they worked harder than everyone else. They obviously had a lot of quality as well, but the biggest factor was their work rate and energy. That’s why they had so much “luck” (no such thing as luck in reality), because they were always prepared to capitalise on an opportunity when they arrived through their work rate and teams couldn’t handle it.
But as champions, they’re facing teams working as hard as them now.
Also, I think teams have realised that if you push on against their full backs, their attack breaks down a lot more. 4-4-2 against them works quite well. Burnley City(2nd half) Everton all played 4-4-2 against them in recent games.
Again, their lack of tactical adaptability is not overriding that.
