A couple of weeks ago, Liverpool seemed on course to win the Premier League for the second season running and probably the Champions League too. The Reds’ run of winning without being that good made it feel inevitable. Winning when not at your best is, after all, a sign (™) of a title-winning side, Clive.
But then Liverpool continued playing not particularly well and started losing. At the same time perennial second-placed, high-performance cowards Arsenal, who have an excellent defence and now at least two very good players in every position, started to close the gap. Arise Sir Mikel.
It is almost as if things can change during a season. It really would be better all round to wait until it is finished and review everything then. But that would be a very long podcast. Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher might get through a couple of pairs of thick white-soled pundit shoes by the time they had broken everything down on the one episode of MondayTuesdayWednesday Night Football at the end of May.
Does three defeats in a row constitute a crisis? As with any football debate it depends entirely on your definition of the key word in the sentence. Is Paul Scholes world class? What do you mean by world class? Are Aston Villa a big club? What does big mean? Are Manchester United back? OK, well, we know the answer to that one.
But for a club of Liverpool’s size, given how good they were last season, mini-crisis seems about right. On TalkSport last week before the Reds’ defeat at Chelsea, I asked their former striker Neil Mellor how many defeats in a row before he starts panicking. He replied six. For the record, we are halfway towards a Neil Mellor Panic.
How that manifests itself we will have to see. But if you see a genial blond 42-year-old man running around Alderley Edge Waitrose (just an educated guess) screaming at a Charlie Bigham lasagne in a few weeks, you’ll know Liverpool have also lost to Manchester United, Eintracht Frankfurt and Brentford.
There are clear problems. Playing well is clearly more difficult if you’re not used to the players around you. Milos Kerkez and Jeremie Frimpong are different footballers to Andy Robertson and Trent Alexander-Arnold. Trying to incorporate Florian Wirtz, who you can tell is such a delightful player, has imbalanced the midfield. Those who watch a lot of the Bundesliga (ie Archie Rhind-Tutt and Lars Sivertsen) will tell you that Wirtz is a touch player, who makes those around him better. He links the play effortlessly, as opposed to “grabbing the game by the scruff of the neck”.
There are also a number of players who shone last season who are not performing as well: Mo Salah, Ibrahima Konaté, Alexis Mac Allister, Conor Bradley. In fact, almost all of them. There is one glaring thing all these people have endured in the very recent past – the death of Diogo Jota.
It is just over three months since they lost their friend. While the news cycle moves on so fast and our pie chart of compassion that we reserve for beyond our own bubble focused on that for a few days before going back to Gaza, Ukraine, ICE, the Manchester terror attack, Liverpool’s players continued to go to work without their mate being there.
It is impossible to know how each player and staff member is feeling on any given day and there is a great deal of projection. Perhaps Salah didn’t track back against Chelsea because he couldn’t be bothered or he was tired. But possibly his form is just a few per cent down because he misses his pal.
It was interesting to hear Enzo Maresca talking before the Chelsea-Liverpool game about the loss of his teammate Antonio Puerta at Sevilla, who had a cardiac arrest on the pitch in a game against Getafe in August 2007 and died in hospital three days later at the age of 22.
“The way they are doing this season is fantastic,” Chelsea’s head coach said of Liverpool. “Especially after Jota’s tragedy. I live exactly the same when I was a player 20 years ago.
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“It’s not easy for the players, it’s not easy for the club, it’s not easy for the manager when you arrive at the training ground and you see every day that place empty. So you have to be very strong. And this is the reason why for me they are doing not good, even better than good. Because they are trying to deal with a problem that is not easy.”
On The Anfield Wrap, Craig Hannan summed it up very well: “They’re still going to be reminded when they hear the song on 20 minutes, when they walk into the dressing room and there’s no one under his hanger. Even during games there’s going to moments when they play a ball and think: ‘Ah well Diogo …’ If Salah’s cried six games ago in front of the Kop it means that just everything isn’t all right now.”
I have come to believe over the course of covering football for a couple of decades that there is a fundamental superficiality to everyone’s analysis of the game. We do not know how any individual is feeling at any given time and what effect that is having on their performance. Jota’s death is one of the starkest examples. We know something terrible happened and we understand what grief is. Beyond that is the intangible level to which this is affecting different people at the club. There is a high chance some of the players themselves don’t really know its effect at any given time.
How the media cover this and how fans dissect performances are clearly not hugely important. At a practical level, if you bring up Jota’s death, it is hard to do it in 10 seconds and then move on to Dominik Szoboszlai’s difficulties at right-back. Beyond this tragedy and beyond Liverpool, it would sound bizarre to caveat every criticism of every player with an admission that we know so little about them, be it their relationship with their parents, if they are going through IVF, if their marriage is breaking down or whatever.
The Guardian Football Weekly regular Nedum Onuoha was on Radio 5 Live the other day talking about how his mother’s death halfway through his career affected his love of the game. “I didn’t enjoy football as much. Some of the highs and the lows that come with it didn’t really feel the same any more.” And that’s half a career; with Jota and Liverpool right now, it is three months.
So whatever Liverpool achieve, if it’s something or if it’s nothing, even if we don’t mention it every time we discuss their games, even if it isn’t the reason they go on to do whatever they go on to do, we should not forget that a few weeks ago they lost not just a brilliant footballer, but more importantly, they lost a friend.
