EPL TALK: Don't believe the tripe, Liverpool

AS A general rule, football supporters have shorter memories than Dory. She had trouble Finding Nemo. Fans struggle to find perspective.

It’s part of the fun. Every official, pundit and journalist is prejudiced against your club. Just as every referee, pundit and journalist is obviously in the pocket of rival clubs. This is the way. Blinkered tribalism forces the unhinged among us to sound like the Mandalorian.

The game's darkest forces conspire, day and night, to bring down your club - and only your club - for hazy, undisclosed reasons. And it’s a bit of a laugh. Football perspective is like sugar in diet drinks. There is none. Zero. The aftertaste is bitter, but otherwise harmless. The lack of perspective is only a problem when it's turned inward.

Liverpool fans, we’re looking at you.

Not all of you, of course. Here comes the usual caveat … Most Reds are diehards and would remain diehards even if they tumbled all the way into the English National League and ended up as Hollywood punchlines on Ryan Reynolds' Welcome to Wrexham show.

But there is currently a vocal minority of Reds – we’ve all heard and read them - calling for more heads than a turkey farmer at Christmas.

The Fenway Sports Group have got to go, right off the bat, to borrow the baseball parlance that the buffoonish American owners are clearly more familiar with. And Jurgen Klopp’s got to go, too. The longest-serving manager in the English Premier League – and the fourth-longest serving coach in Liverpool’s history – is overseeing a broken team, a broken system and a broken right-back - especially a broken right-back.

This column is barely 10 paragraphs old so there’s an obligation to eviscerate Trent Alexander-Arnold for being the little genius who could not. (And if anyone fancies playing Alexander-Arnold bingo, just Google search his name and “one on one” and “defensive situations” and knock yourself out.)

The right-back is a liability. Roberto Firmino is too old. Jordan Henderson is too slow. Mo Salah is too peripheral. Darwin Nunez is too expensive. Joe Gomez is too lightweight at elite level. Virgil van Dijk is an elite-level defender who suddenly looks too lightweight. And everyone else is too pedestrian and predictable to ever trouble the upper echelons again.

Anyone would think this rabble played 63 games last season with a smaller squad, a limited budget and are still dealing with the psychological hangover of missing out on a unique quadruple by the tiniest of heart-breaking margins. Get over it lads, eh?

Dismantling of Rangers shows Reds demise might be exaggerated

Hysteria is commonplace in the EPL. A perpetual state of outrage is the only currency accepted in the self-serving news cycle. Nothing clicks online like anger, intolerance and an unhinged demand to remove members of the most successful Liverpool squad in decades.

Even so, a loud and visible portion of the Reds’ fan base are covering themselves in about as much glory as Alexander-Arnold in a one-on-one defensive situation (yes, it’s an obligation.)

The mini-meltdowns are amusing, to a point, even if they come with the kind of entitled whining usually found when one of the Kardashians can’t find a credit card at the counter.

What, exactly, is there to whine about? Apart from the historic exception in 2020, Liverpool often suffer a blip after finishing second in the table, which is surely an expected and reasonable price to pay for a team, squad and manager that have overachieved for so long. Even anti-Scouser Gary Neville believes Klopp’s achievements surpass those of Pep Guardiola. Wouldn’t it be nice if the entire Liverpool fanbase felt the same way?

Besides, the 7-1 dismantling of Rangers in the Champions League offered a timely reminder that rumours of Liverpool’s demise might be exaggerated. Firmino seems determined to make the late transition from warm-up man to main event, at the age of 31, scoring two and setting up another for Nunez in perhaps the most complete individual attacking performance from a Reds forward this season.

He appears ready for Manchester City at Anfield on Sunday.

Substitute Salah scored the fastest hat-trick in Champions League history - six minutes and 12 seconds – in a virtuoso display of fast feet, quick movement and precise finishing.

He’s always ready for Manchester City at Anfield.

And Gomez was reliable in those one on one defensive situations you keep reading about, popping up with an assist at the other end and perhaps realising that a mercurial Liverpool career really needs to settle in its eighth season.

He should be ready for Manchester City at Anfield.

They all should. Kevin de Bruyne certainly expects “the best Liverpool possible” on Sunday, which wasn’t him offering a polite soundbite, but a statement of fact based on experience. The Reds typically over-perform against City. They have to. Klopp’s high-stakes pressing has been a calculated gamble for years, one that still appears to be misjudged in some quarters.

Of course the system is creaking now. Of course the right-back position is vulnerable. Klopp’s formation and style takes risks to close the gaps, literally and financially, between the Reds and the petrodollar-fuelled behemoth that has the priceless luxury of choice.

City can recycle possession for fun, for hours, for entire seasons. De Bruyne collects, looks up and finds Bernardo Silva, or Phil Foden, or Riyah Mahrez, or Jack Grealish, or even Erling Haaland, to really showcase their endless riches. They can pass and move, in pretty, little circles, for as long as they want, an endless spin cycle of refined and expensive elegance.

Liverpool have never been able to compete with this approach, in any sense, so they tried to drown out Guardiola’s jazz with Klopp’s heavy metal, often getting close, occasionally succeeding, but no one should be under any illusion of the chasm that remains between them. It was always there. It’s just getting wider now.

Rather than criticise the divide, celebrate how close it was and recognise that Liverpool retain the ability, even now, to bloody City’s aristocratic noses, if Salah, Firmino and Gomez find the spaces and mind the gaps at both ends.

Just acknowledging this possibility, that Liverpool still boast enough creative outlets to potentially upset City, has to be a cause for celebration. The tantrums among the disgruntled minority are entertaining, but outraged Reds really should remember how lucky they are.

Neil Humphreys is an award-winning football writer and a best-selling author, who has covered the English Premier League since 2000 and has written 26 books.

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