What a crash course in Barclays that is for Arne Slot, by the way.
Hailed as a calm and quiet genius for delivering the title with a settled squad in his first season. Pretty much handed a second title after winning five games on the trot at the start of his second season.
And now, after an admittedly quite ropey fortnight that has seen Liverpool plummet from the very summit of the Premier League all the way down to second place and one whole point behind the new leaders, he is as bald and fraudulent as any Premier League manager has ever been. And those are some high levels of bald fraudulence.
His tactics are being questioned. His selections, his signings – even though they aren’t really even necessarily his signings – his substitutions. Everything.
The man who delivered only Liverpool’s second league title since the invention of football, and who was pretty much being handed a second by a league apparently collectively bending the knee barely two weeks ago, now finds himself level with Scott Parker in the Sack Race.
Of course the sheer scale of the CRISIS talk around Liverpool is completely insane. But perhaps only Arsenal can rival Liverpool when it comes to a completely unhinged, overwrought and overplayed narrative. The good times are always the very best ever, but that means the lows are met with the same levels of wild overreaction.
Still, though. Definitely feels true that something’s not quite right here, doesn’t it? Definitely not a Liverpool – or Slot – carrying themselves with the same quiet unfussed equilibrium that steered them so calmly through last season. We’re perhaps all already guilty of forgetting both how easily Liverpool won the title and how unexpected that actually was at the start of the season and based on the club’s Premier League history.
They were so good, so quickly under Slot that it became normalised and perhaps even underappreciated.
We must always never forget that Liverpool as a club and as people went through a real and horrific human tragedy this summer that makes this season a uniquely difficult and painful experience for them.
But however understandable the prosaic footballing reasons and heartbreaking real-life ones, that calm authority hasn’t been there this season. There’s been a madcap, desperate nature to Liverpool’s performances that was every bit as much present in their late wins as it has been in their late defeats.
The late goals that have swung so many Liverpool games all bore the Hallmark of Champions™ when going in at the right end, so it’s only fair to ask what they have now they’ve started going in at the other.
Of course, once again, we’re in territory where both are overplayed.
But we nevertheless find ourselves already building up for what suddenly looks like an epic Liverpool-Man United clash on the other side of the international break, one where the loser will be unavoidably and inevitably plunged into a deep and lasting crisis.
Is it accurate, fair, funny or clever to call that game El Crisico? Absolutely not. Is there even the slightest chance that will stop us? Absolutely not.
