Five excellent reasons why Liverpool won't win the Premier League title
We’ve ruled out Arsenal and Manchester City, so now there is simply no other option but to also provide five – and it must always be five – reasons why Liverpool also won’t win the title.
Two of these three pieces will therefore end up wisely prophetic, and the other one will make us look like damn fools. We’re frankly delighted about this, because it far exceeds our standard ratio for predictions.
On we go, then, with the final contenders in this arse-nipper of a three-way fight…
They aren’t even supposed to be here today
Bit vague and woolly this, but there’s no doubt Liverpool are the ‘What are you doing here?’ contender this year. That in itself is a curious thing given their long-standing status as City’s closest/only rivals during the Guardiola era, but it’s nevertheless true.
Quite literally every human on earth expected City to be in the title race. There were some questions about whether Arsenal could back up last season’s unexpected efforts, because they are Arsenal, but it’s no real surprise that the answer to that has turned out to be emphatically yes.
Liverpool, though? This was a Team in Transition, forced into a rushed midfield overhaul and set for a work-in-progress of a season where a return to the Champions League was a reasonable limit to expectations.
We don’t want to get too far down the cognitive dissonance road favoured by many Liverpool fans, one where the Reds are both uniquely massive This Means More merchants while simultaneously being teeny-tiny underdogs pluckily fighting the good fight against unstoppable forces, but they are definitely the rogue element in this scrap.
It seems a weird thing to say about the team that is top with 11 games to play, but it still feels like if this title race was to become a two-horse race then it will be Liverpool who have slipped out of the running. They’re doing things by the skin of their arse just too often, surely, even if we can all enjoy the sight of them annoying Gladiator-botherer Mark Clattenburg by doing so.
The Injury Crisis™
You’d be forgiven for thinking, given some of the coverage, that ‘having players out injured’ is a unique new innovation Liverpool have come up with, but at the same time it is an absurdly extreme example of the genre.
Off the top of our heads, Liverpool’s injury crisis has robbed them of Mohamed Salah, Curtis Jones, Ryan Gravenberch, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Diogo Jota, Alisson, Stefan Bajcetic, Thiago, Joel Matip and Ben Doak.
Of those, only Bajcetic is a reach for ‘first-team squad’ with the other nine assorted levels of integral. It’s a list that contains three members of what might be considered Liverpool’s core four of Salah, Alexander-Arnold, Alisson and Virgil van Dijk and also far too many midfielders for any squad to comfortably negotiate the absences.
But here’s the thing. This injury list, which would be burdensomely large to handle across a whole season, is in fact just the list of those currently missing. Darwin Nunez and Dominik Szoboszlai are feeling their way back from injury, while Wataru Endo picked up a knock in the Carabao final but has simply not been permitted to have that be a significant injury because there’s quite simply nobody else available.
The Quadruple bid
The thing with Quadruples is that not only do they rarely happen, but that even the Icarus-like attempt at flying towards that particular sun can unravel a whole season. There’s a warning from history for Liverpool here in the shape of old foes Manchester United last season.
Now United were never quite in the title race the way Liverpool undoubtedly are this year and the media pretended for five minutes Erik Ten Hag’s gang were, but they were on the fringes of it. And had very presentable chances of adding the Europa League and FA Cup to the early Carabao success.
They’re not entirely different situations, is what we’re saying, and United ended up exhausted, spent and unable to add anything else to the trophy cabinet after the Carabao. They did manage to scramble their way to the FA Cup final, but in the Europa League were well beaten over two legs by Sevilla in the last eight while any far-fetched title aspirations they may have held were ended at almost this exact time last year in a run of three games that began with a game Liverpool fans might just remember at Anfield that was followed by a limp goalless draw at home to relegation-haunted Southampton and a pretty decent beating off Newcastle.
Liverpool have just come off a run of four games in 11 days and today embark on another such run before the international break, across three competitions, that includes clashes with both Manchester clubs. And there is little scope for the fixture list to ease over the weeks and months that follow.
Emotional farewells
Liverpool have, to be fair, kept this in reasonable check so far, but the longer the title bid remains on track and the greater the chance of it actually happening, the more the Jurgen Klopp Farewell Title narrative is going to mount.
Klopp himself is clearly aware of this and doing everything he can in his power to play it down, but there’s only so much even he can do to keep a lid on it. If there’s one club that can handle the idea that circumstances dictate that something might perhaps mean more to them than their rivals, it still has enormous potential to shift from source of inspiration to albatross around the neck, suffocating Liverpool’s young bucks under the weight of what is by definition a unique one-off opportunity for this specific storyline, something that doesn’t apply in north London or Manchester.
Fourth and fifth
The top three may be away and clear, but the next two have opened up gaps of their own over everyone else. Aston Villa have been consistently pretty bloody good all season, while Spurs are not in any way consistent but bring a chaotic energy that almost matches Liverpool’s own.
Both are clearly enormously dangerous opponents, and Liverpool are slated to face them back-to-back right as the title race will reach its keenest pitch in early May. Neither City nor Arsenal were able to beat Tottenham at home, while both lost at Villa Park.
Liverpool will very likely have to avoid not just one but both of those mishaps to stay in contention, even if they do somehow manage to drag themselves through the vast thicket of matches that stands between now and that ticklish problem without losing touch.
