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In the space of four days, Liverpool saw its dreams crumble into dust. At Watford last Saturday, defeat ensured Jürgen Klopp’s team lost an unbeaten record it had spent months carefully curating, fiercely defending. It can now no longer match the achievement of Arsenal’s 2003-4 team, and end the season invincible.
Then, on Tuesday, Klopp’s players drifted out of the F.A. Cup at Chelsea, undone by a combination of poor goalkeeping, softhearted defending and an 18-year-old Scottish midfielder named Billy Gilmour. With that, Liverpool’s hopes of a league, cup and Champions League treble evaporated.
The way the team is playing — devoid of creativity in attack, suddenly infused with vulnerability in defense — it is hard not to think that various other targets will go the same way in the near future.
Atlético Madrid will be reasonably confident of ending Liverpool’s defense of the Champions League at Anfield on Wednesday; the Spanish team has a 1-0 lead from the first leg to cling to, and nobody clings better than Diego Simeone’s side.
Defeats to Everton next week and Manchester City in early April, meanwhile, would make the chances of Liverpool’s finishing the season with more than 100 points — surpassing City’s points tally of two years ago, and therefore making this statistically the best league performance ever mustered by an English team — negligible. Klopp’s players, all of a sudden, would have no margin for error.
Still, at least Liverpool would have one source of solace: barring a quite spectacular, unprecedented collapse, a choke to end all chokes, it should still win the Premier League — the trophy the club wants more than any other, the title the fans have waited 30 years to reclaim, the crown Klopp was brought to Anfield to win — at some point between now and May. “Only the Premier League,” Virgil Van Dijk said, with withering sarcasm, this week.
There is no need to downplay how bad Liverpool’s last few days have been. The display at Watford was abysmal. Chelsea was better — and Klopp has always made it clear he does not, particularly, value the F.A. Cup — but it was hardly encouraging, the furious “response” Liverpool’s players had promised after the unbeaten run vaporized. In light of what went before, the last week has been a jarring, screeching stall.
Nor is it hysteria to suggest that the team has struggled for form and rhythm since England’s belated, half-baked winter break, or to believe that the visit of Bournemouth to Anfield on Saturday now looks considerably more arduous than it might have a month ago.
It is not even entirely ridiculous to feel that there remains a glimmer of hope for anyone disappointed by the lack of drama thus far in the Premier League title race; fail to win this weekend and what is currently a hiccup starts to look like a genuine downturn. Manchester City, for one, might detect the faintest scent of blood; the 22-point gap could be cut in half by the end of Liverpool’s game at the Etihad Stadium in April.
But at the same time, it is strange that Liverpool has spent much of the last week being criticized for not meeting targets it had never set and most fans had never envisaged. It is curious, too, that there is a possibility that winning the league at long, long last now seems destined to be characterized as some sort of disappointment.
In part, of course, that is because of the standards Liverpool has set: it won 26 of its first 27 games of the season. Argentina’s coach, Luis Scaloni, suggested only a few weeks ago it was invincible. It has become a point of reference across European soccer: over the course of the season, I have spoken to a dozen or more coaches in almost as many countries who are dazzled by the work Klopp has done. Players are almost as breathless in their praise.
After all that, it is hard not to feel that there might be some sort of bathos in ending the season as “only” — sorry, Virgil — champion of England. (Winning the Club World Cup is not quite as significant, to most fans, as it sounds). Liverpool fans will be sated, of course, by ending their wait, as is only right. To others, though, this is a team that has seemed, for months, to be on course to etch a place in history, to achieve something that might last forever. It was not supposed to be just another champion.
But the reaction serves as testament, too, to how susceptible we are — in the news media, among fans, in the broader soccer culture — to hyperbole; to how quickly we upgrade our expectations; to how readily we lift the bar for success, ensuring that failure comes more easily; how we judge teams and players by standards that are ill-defined and essentially unfair.
There is a reason only one team since the Victorian era has gone undefeated through the season; there is a reason only one English team has ever completed the treble; there is a reason only one team has staged a clean sweep of England’s domestic trophies: it is really, really hard to do.
When Klopp insisted he was taking the season game by game, he was not downplaying his ambitions. It just was not one of his ambitions. If it happened, great, but it was too distant a prospect to be considered in his plans.
Perhaps, too, he realized what was coming: the more that people talked about Liverpool going through the season undefeated, the more the team would be criticized if it did not. The closer Liverpool got to achieving a treble, the more it would feel like failure if one or two (or three) trophies slipped from its grasp.
If that is the case, Klopp has been proved right this week. Liverpool failed at Watford and at Chelsea — not to meet its own expectations, or even the expectations of its fans, but the expectations laden upon it, expectations it could not, realistically, have hoped to live up to.
It feels, I think, as if there is a truth for all fans, of all teams, in here somewhere, a lesson that maybe everyone might learn. No matter what you achieve, no matter how well you do, there is always someone telling you there is something more you could have done. Liverpool should still make its fans’ dream come true this year. It will just have to get used to being told that its dream was not big enough.
What Is Normal? It Depends on Your Perspective
Stop me if I have told this story — what I like to think of as the Parable of the Old Trafford Singing Section — before. Last summer, Manchester United consulted various fan groups as to how to improve the atmosphere at Old Trafford. The answer that came back was that a dedicated singing section should be established, and that the club should endeavor not to pipe in music in the minutes leading to kick off. Let the fans make the noise.
So the club did as requested. It cut the music, and waited for the fans to sing. They didn’t. It turned out that the fans who felt there should be no artifice in creating an atmosphere tended to spend as much time as possible in the pub before a game, and only entered at the last minute. That was their matchday routine; they were just assuming it was everyone else’s, too. In their absence, all that was left was a weird, awkward silence.
That was the germ of this story. Fans in the Bundesliga have been protesting against Monday night games for almost three years. But the fate of the Old Trafford singing section made me wonder: Who has decided that soccer should not be played on Monday nights? Is the idea that games should kick off on Saturdays not simply the tradition of one generation being foisted upon another?
But reporting on a country where fans have done so much to shape soccer in their own image — making their voices heard on issues like ownership, policing and even the designs of stadiums — sparked another thought.
In England, fans have a tendency to accept decisions made very clearly not in their interests — ticket prices, scheduling of games, unwelcome entities buying their clubs — as inevitable. That is the nature of soccer, we are told. This is a price worth paying so that your team can compete in the transfer market or the league. This is the way it has to be. This is normal.
But normal is relative. In Germany, much of the experience of being a fan of an English club must seem completely alien. And it is hard not to think that having a soccer culture that reflects the values of its fans and customers is infinitely preferable, even if it means they occasionally go too far.
A League on Hiatus
Belatedly, eventually, Italian soccer’s authorities seem to have found an intelligent response to the outbreak of Covid-19, the coronavirus raging in the country’s north: though this week’s Coppa Italia semifinals were postponed, Serie A will continue behind closed doors until (at least) April 3.
While public health, obviously, has to be the primary concern, this seems to be the only way of attempting to ensure the league not only finishes its season, but does so with something approaching parity: anything less than a wholesale measure would have given, or at least would have seemed to have given, some teams — those playing in front of crowds — an unfair advantage.
The impact the ruling has on the Champions League — where Juventus now will have to play its last-16 second leg against Lyon in an empty stadium, and where Atalanta may yet have to play a quarterfinal without fans — is likely to be different. But again: soccer is not especially important in the context. It is only a sport, as I wrote last week, no matter how often it feels like it is more.
That will become clear now, of course, and it is partly why it took Italy so long to reach this inevitable conclusion: without fans, games no longer seem to be quite the spectacle they appear. It is what happens in the stands that gives a soccer match — any sporting event, really — its emotional resonance.
As anyone who has ever watched a game in an empty stadium will know, it is when the shouts of the coaches echo clearly around a ground, when goals are scored and only a handful of people halfheartedly celebrate them, that it becomes clear that it is fans who give soccer not just its background, but its meaning.
Correspondence
A dose of brutal realism from Joe Klonowski, who writes in to confess that the league which is host to his team — Major League Soccer — is definitively not the best in the world, despite my attempts at coddling last week. “I have to fly 10 hours one way to see the best football,” he wrote.
“I can take a 10-minute train ride to see M.L.S., but it just isn’t the same. I honestly think if they did away with the salary cap and added promotion and relegation they’d be on the level of the big European leagues in 20 or 30 years, but they’ll never do that.”
As it happens, we discussed M.L.S. — the standards and perceptions thereof — in this week’s Set Piece Menu podcast, and it occurred to me that one change that could be made, given the league’s expansion, would be to introduce a second tier. That still enables the owners to guarantee incomes, but might help to drive interest for teams not in contention for the playoffs.
That’s all for this week. Thanks for all the correspondence to askrory@nytimes.com; please keep it coming. I will be making sarcastic comments about all of this week’s big games on Twitter. Please direct all of the people you hold in the highest esteem here, so that they, too, can benefit from my ill-conceived suggestions for how to change M.L.S.
Have a great weekend.
Source: Soccer - nytimes.com
