DATE: MONDAY 17th OCTOBER 2016
PLACE: ANFIELD
TIME: 20:00
vs 
The difficulty in narrating an atmosphere change in football is that it can very quickly turn the other way again. United are no longer the irrepressible force they were under Mr Ferguson yet they've still finished above us in the last two seasons. For one wonderful, magical season, a resurgence looked on the cards. Then it rapidly crumbled away, back to where it had started. The force was significantly weaker but our overhaul plan didn't sustain.
And yet here we are, seven games into the season, entering this game as favourites. Confidence is soaring, people are starting to make hints about a potential title challenge (premature or not) and we've deservedly won six of our last seven games in all competitions (the one draw coming against second place Tottenham). Two of our starting midfielders may miss the game through injury but hey... we've got two very strong replacements to come in if they don't make it. The signs are that the landscape is changing.
This is no more evident than when looking at the quandaries surrounding each team going into this game. For us, the question is more or less that of who's fit. The system of play (base formation, pressing, tempo) is unlikely to alter. In United's camp though, the questions appear to be far more reactive, i.e. 'Just how will we go about resisting Liverpool's attacking threat?'.
Of course Mourinho has history of being able to subdue attacking forces. He's famous for his attitude to big games ('the team that wins is generally the team that makes the fewest mistakes'). He's done it enough times that people are no longer shocked when it happens. Obviously, we all painfully remember consequences of the time it happened to us.
But this feels different. If we're to look at the bigger picture beyond this game, it feels different. Even if United finish above us in the league this season, it feels different.
That's not all down to our manager; it's very rarely all down to one person, especially given the fickle short-termism that poisons fan bases in the modern game. But no one is kidding themselves enough to deny that a significant portion of it is down to our big German. Monday Night Football would have been swiftly forgiven the other week for cancelling their showing of Burnley v Watford and replacing it with an extra three hours of Jurgen Klopp discussing the history of paintbrush manufacturing had it come to it. That wouldn't have been restricted to our fans either - even neutrals and opposition fans cannot help but be overwhelmingly impressed by the man. And that is perhaps his greatest achievement so far; that just a year into this 'project', opposing managers, players and fans are already more focused on our strengths than they are on our weaknesses. We're effectively on the front foot before a ball is even being kicked.
What makes this even more extraordinary is when you take into account just how far off we are from being the finished product (if such a thing exists). Should United score on Monday, we will have gone ten Premier League games without a clean sheet (
https://twitter.com/DanKennett/status/785150287048835072), our worst run since 1998 under the tenure of Roy Evans. Make no bones about it - that's a terrible record. Any suggestion that we might have found the formula for a solid defence is extremely naive at this stage, even with our recent domination of games (Swansea notwithstanding) in mind. Yet it's that domination that is proving of primary focus for people outside the club, so much so that the lack of clean sheets appears, for the moment, to be a background element. Should the lack of clean sheets continue (especially if it's via crosses and set pieces) then this may change a little. But even then, it will be impossible to ignore or put to the back of your mind what we have the capability of doing to you.
That's how we go into this game. We've beaten better teams than United already this season. By contrast, they've failed their only big test so far. They're improving (they comfortably beat Leicester two weeks ago and they easily had enough opportunities to beat Stoke) but so are we. This is a game we can go into with belief. That doesn't make us complacent; no one of rational mind thinks this is a foregone conclusion and our confidence will not have been misplaced should we lose. In no way should we be reluctant though to consider ourselves favourites in case the result does not come. Our manager wants a new era of belief and he's repaying us already. I think we're all confident there's a lot more to come.
Starting Monday.
