Only getting around to posting a reply to this wonderful OP now. Lots of valuable food for thought there around expectations, and even though it was prompted by gripes in some quarters over a smaller than expected goals return from games against the likes of Huddersfield and, in particular, Cardiff (incidentally, lest we forget, beating that kind of team at all has often been beyond Liverpool sides, including this one e.g. 0-0 draws against West Brom and Stoke at home last season and a 0-1 defeat at Swansea, all of whom were relegated), it is perhaps especially relevant in the aftermath of last night’s game against the more challenging obstacle represented by Arsenal.
Yesterday’s result admittedly feels like a disappointment in the particular context of the team Liverpool are chasing and the challenge that represents. In winning the Premier League last season, Manchester City became the first team in the history of English football’s top flight to break 100 points. Take your Shanklys and Paisleys, your Fergusons and Busbys, your Revies and Chapmans, your Cloughs, Mourinhos and the rest, your champions of Europe, your double and treble winners — not one of them managed to reach 100 points in winning the English league championship. Furthermore, City scored 106 goals in the process. By way of context, Liverpool, regardless of division, have managed that feat just twice in over 125 years of existence (1895/96 and 2013/14). Alex Ferguson never managed it in over a quarter of a century. Arsenal’s “invincibles”? Not even close.
So as far as challenging Manchester City goes, a team that has been historically good statistically, we’re very much into uncharted territory here. On that, there is very little room for argument. From here, Jürgen Klopp’s men play 9 Premier League games before their visit to the Etihad early in the new year, including the return fixture against Arsenal and two huge local derbies against Everton and Manchester United, the latter coming hot on the heels of a couple of potentially pivotal European fixtures with the oil money...sorry, world-class talents...of Paris Saint-Germain and Carlo Ancelotti’s Napoli respectively. And it’s hard to shake the feeling that even if Liverpool were to win all 9 of them (which, to be clear, is a gargantuan task), they will remain these 2 points behind Manchester City going into that game, such is the relentlessness of Pep Guardiola’s results-machine.
However, the fact that a 1-1 draw at the Emirates can feel like such a disappointment is another clear statement of Liverpool’s progress. There was a time not so long ago where average performances there usually resulted in sound defeats, or sometimes draws snatched from the jaws of victory — a 2-0 lead there last December suddenly morphed into an error-strewn 2-3 deficit, for example. And a team managed by Unai Emery and comprising attacking talent like Alexandre Lacazette, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Mesut Özil (each of them signed for substantially more than Mo Salah, for example, and good enough to temporarily make them the second-highest scorers in the League as of yesterday) was never going to be easy pickings, especially on their home patch.
And yet the truth is that this was a game Liverpool could have had wrapped up by half-time with a competent linesman and an adjustment to the right of about six inches on Virgil Van Dijk’s header just before the break. The possession of the ball was theirs, but it seemed like the majority of the game-winning chances were Liverpool’s. What we should all try to remember after this game, or at least what I’m trying to remember, is that the process of winning a first League title in roughly three decades is a long-term thing. Whether it comes next May, or the following May, or the May after that, this is an evolving operation.
So when I look at a Liverpool midfield giving its team very little in the way of a platform for victory once again last night (not quite as bad as the Napoli game at the start of October, but some way off the level it needs to be hitting), I try to remember that Fabinho will almost certainly settle down eventually and become a key building block into the future, and also that both Naby Keita and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain will return at some point and more than likely provide the necessary level of dynamism and creativity that was sorely lacking in this game. Not to mention the fact that between now and the start of the 2019/20 season, there will also be the matter of a couple of transfer windows for the manager to strengthen his squad as he sees fit, something he (in conjunction with Michael Edwards, of course) has proven to be quite adept at.
Personally, in the middle of this team's ongoing development, I wouldn’t be the least bit concerned about goal difference because in the unlikely event that it comes down to that, as it has so rarely done in the history of English football’s top flight (there are only six times as far as I can make out that the title was decided on goals scored, goal difference or goal average: 1923/24, 1949/50, 1952/53, 1964/65, 1988/89 and 2011/12), it will mean that the first job has been successfully accomplished. That job is to match City for points, and given that they achieved a total last season that the greatest sides in the history of English football never reached, I’m sure we would all take that if it was offered to us right now, especially since that team is unquestionably further along in its evolution than Klopp’s.
Furthermore, concentrating purely on goals scored under-sells the staggering progress Liverpool have achieved defensively this season, moving from 17 conceded in the first 11 games last year to 5 this time. Yet again, even with a couple of players below par (Alexander-Arnold for sure, arguably Fabinho), that defensive unit was the standout performer yesterday. 5 goals conceded in 11 games, which has included trips to Crystal Palace, Leicester, Tottenham, Chelsea, Arsenal and the visit of Manchester City, is a scarcely believable return, even taking into account Liverpool's previous defensive improvement following the introductions of Van Dijk and Andy Robertson to the side around the turn of the year (and one of those goals was Alisson’s attempted Cruyff-turn gift at Leicester).
A combination of individual talent and collective excellence has suddenly made this team one of the toughest nuts to crack in European football, and make no mistake, that kind of obduracy has been proven time and time again to be very valuable in breeding the kind of consistency required to win trophies (and maintain a high goal difference).
Ferguson’s greatest Manchester United side was almost certainly the one which won him three league titles in a row from 2007—2009 and reached two European Cup finals, winning one. Yet they never got within 20 goals of City’s total from last season and in 2008/09, even with expensive attacking talent like Ronaldo, Rooney, Tevez and Berbatov at their disposal, they scored 68. That team won 10 of its 38 League games 1-0. Add in three 0-0 draws, three 1-1 draws and their four defeats, and that’s 20 games out of 38 where they scored a single goal or less. Sometimes they won by battering teams, sometimes they leaned on a defence that went 1,334 minutes at one stage without conceding; either way, they ended the season as champions, on 90 points.
Would a similar total be enough for Liverpool to overhaul Manchester City this season? I would edge towards “no”, although it took a late goal against a relegation-threatened team for even a team as good as this one to hit 100 points last season, so it’s certainly not a given that they’ll do it again — 6-1 wins over Huddersfield and Southampton still only net you three points, after all. But the important thing is for Liverpool, chasing the kind of team that Ferguson arguably came across only once in 25 years as Manchester United boss (the similarly financially-doped Chelsea of the mid-2000’s), to stick to them like glue in terms of wins and points for as long as possible until they surpass them, whether that turns out to be over a period of months or years. If that approach sees the Reds coming up short on goal difference at some point, then it’s clearly an issue that will need to be addressed, but probably not until then, at least not as an urgency.
In the meantime, it’s a moot point until Liverpool match City for points over 38 games. That’s the main challenge here. But whatever ultimately happens, I’m confident that the only way Klopp’s face disappears from Pep’s rear-view mirror over the next 5 years and beyond is when the German finally pulls his Opel Mokka past his great rival on the Premier League Autobahn. Until then, Liverpool are built, and being built, to haunt the Spaniard’s every move. And after nearly three decades of futile efforts in this regard, that alone should be cause for excitement.
