If the last visit of a north London club to Anfield resulted in a flurry of knockout punches landed in an opening round which ended with Arsenal being held up by the ropes and taking an 8-count, yesterday’s game against their neighbours Spurs was somewhat different. We landed another crushing early blow, true, but what came afterwards was a level of total control to an extent that we hadn’t yet seen from this team and was more akin to keeping our opponents at arm’s length as they hopelessly swung at thin air. In some ways, it was like we had taken the opening 20 minutes against Arsenal (after which we led 4-0) and stretched it out over a full 90 minutes (after which we led 4-0). Tottenham were awful, you’ll get no arguments from me there, and Tim Sherwood’s post-match comments that “at 2-0 and the game going away and then 3-0, I am going to learn more from my players from sitting up there and having a good look at it, rather than getting involved and maybe getting myself in trouble of the touchline” illustrated their biggest problem and one which, in truth, meant that they never had a chance yesterday, namely a manager abdicating responsibility and throwing the focus solely onto his players. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it done to quite that extent before, at any level, and if I was a Spurs fan I’d be livid with that. You can’t control yourself? What are you, 5? Anyway, with all of that said, they’re still the 6th best team in the League for the time-being and yet Liverpool treated them like relegation-fodder. I must admit, as big a believer as I am in this team and its manager, I still didn’t expect that. This Liverpool side goes from strength to strength and is writing a story that seems to demand a happy ending with more and more ferocity as the weeks go by. It’s not a humble suggestion or a respectful request anymore, it’s getting to be an outright decree, and it’s looking more likely that they’ll get it with each and every passing game.
That story begins in goal with Simon Mignolet, more specifically his penalty save against Stoke in August. In the moment of truth where lesser men wilt, he instead seemed to grow in stature, smacking the crossbar as if daring Jonathan Walters to beat this, less a man now than a fucking entity that simply would not be beaten. Walters shrank in the moment, Mignolet thrived on it, feeding on his opponent’s fear and the hopes of 45,000 men, women and children. He shook the crossbar but, in truth, he shook a lot more along with it: he shook Walters, he shook Anfield and he shook the monkey called Stoke City off our collective back. Tell me this: in retrospect, even if you doubted yourself along the way, did that moment not feel significant? Does it feel even more so now, Stoke, the thorn in our side for so long thwarted, a harbinger of what was to come? It all started with Mignolet. There was a moment in the first-half yesterday where Bentaleb (I think) hit a rasper from all of 30/35 yards that flew towards goal. It was more or less straight down the middle but it was powerful and it was dipping and swerving. An image of the ball being spilled into the path of the onrushing Soldado briefly flashed across my mind such was the punch packed by it and the scars of seasons past, but I needn’t have worried: our young Belgian ‘keeper stooped and took it into his arms like a mishit daisy-cutter. From a 10 year-old. I’m honestly not sure anymore if there’s a safer pair of hands in the Premier League in those kinds of situations than Simon Mignolet. A little while later, he punched a Spurs effort away from his goal like some kind of Greek god smiting a world that had accidentally come into his orbit. This lad grew in stature before our very eyes on the opening day against Stoke as Liverpool embarked on this beautiful journey and he hasn’t stopped since. Even the odd mistake hasn’t knocked him back, he just keeps growing and growing (he looked 10-feet tall facing that Walters penalty, he must be up to a good 150 now). There are still one or two rough edges to his game but he’s learning all the time (e.g. I thought his distribution, nominally a weakness, was excellent yesterday), and when the moment of truth arrives again during the next six games, as it no doubt will in some shape or form, I’ll take our young Belgian over Joe Hart, I’ll take him over Peter Cech, I’ll have him over the lot because he absolutely reeks of old-school Liverpool and, as such, I know he’ll rise to meet that moment head-on without so much as an inch of a backward step.
Then you move forward, you move into the back four. Has any individual on this team had a more unlikely journey than Martin Skrtel? Once, he launched anything that came within a five-foot radius of his boot or head; once, he was so uncomfortable with the football at his feet that he turned around rather than play a pass off his left during Brendan Rodgers’ first game at Anfield against Manchester City and left his backpass to Pepe Reina horribly short and in the clutches of Carlos Tevez; once, he was dominated by Oldham Athletic and looked like a man on his way out of the club. These days, he brings balls down on his chest effortlessly and immediately turns to attack; these days, he passes to teammates surrounded by two opposition players; these days, he’s become a latter-day Sami Hyypia from set-pieces, keeping this train rolling with the opening double-salvo against Arsenal and two superb finishes when his team was struggling against Cardiff. Suddenly, the big Slovakian who’s been a leader and justified every little bit of faith placed in him by his manager seems like the last player who should be losing his place in the team. What a turnaround from even two, three months ago, but hey, just like Mignolet, cometh the hour cometh the man. Not only does Skrtel look like he’s enjoying his football right now, he looks like he’s revelling in the heat of this furnace where history is forged and legends are made. Did you see his block against Eriksen yesterday as the Spurs man threatened to make it 2-1 before half-time? Did you see his block at Old Trafford as Rooney looked certain to equalise before half-time? Skrtel may still be prone to errors but he’s been a colossus this season, and especially in the last few weeks. As the stakes have risen, this man has shone.
And then you look alongside him to his long-time partner, Daniel Agger, a player as skilful as any in the team whose presence in that back-four so often leads imperceptibly to authority, calm and, as RAWK’s Juan Loco pointed out on Twitter yesterday, nearly as many clean-sheets in his last 100 starts for Liverpool (46) as Vincent Kompany for Manchester City (47) – and needless to say, one of these teams is not widely noted for its defensive prowess (spoiler: it’s not City). Tell me he’s not taking this challenge by the scruff of the neck? If his team ends up winning the League and finding that aforementioned happy ending, there will probably be dozens of single moments that people will look back on as significant milestones, moments that perhaps had the potential to alter the course of the season had they gone another way. If Steven Gerrard is lifting that trophy come the 11th of May, I’ll almost certainly be looking back on a moment 31 minutes into the game at St. Mary’s a few weeks ago where, with Liverpool nursing a 1-0 advantage and under intense pressure from the home side, the ball fell to Adam Lallana in the box. It’s hard to tell from replays whether Agger got a little nick on the resulting shot that took it onto the post, but he certainly put Lallana off to such an extent that he had to rush his effort. Had that gone in, there’s no telling how Liverpool’s season might have panned out: they may have simply gone down the other end and scored again, or maybe Southampton would have rode the resulting momentum all the way to three points. Agger’s quick thinking that night may have stopped that and kept the journey alive at a crucial moment.
You look at Jon Flanagan and you just laugh at the beautiful absurdity of this young man coming in and playing to a level that none of us expected. You laugh at a Brazilian World Cup-winning full-back following him on Twitter and singing his praises, this young, unheralded local lad with 30-odd appearances to his name. You look at him and you just laugh at the magic of it all, of how he dropped the shoulder at Old Trafford and sent all £37m of Juan Mata on an Antarctic fishing expedition as he rampaged up the field, and yesterday, that turn, those tackles. Pure and utter desire. I wonder if Manchester City have someone like Jon Flanagan? Oh I know, I know they’ve got plenty of talent and ability, plenty of shiny new toys, some of them still in the packaging (if they put Stevan Jovetić up for sale on eBay, for example, the ad would surely read “one Montenegrin international, in mint condition, barely used”). But do they have a Flanagan, a Gerrard, local lads living their dream and playing for more than just medals and money? I don’t care if it sounds gay, Gerrard’s smile this season has been something to behold. He believes, not only that Liverpool can win the title but also in the players around him, something which hasn’t always been the case and that almost gives me more confidence than anything else. You can see it written all over him that he thinks this team is fucking brilliant. There’s no agitation, no sense that he has to stretch himself if this Premier League thing is going to happen before he retires. Two local lads, one of them a legend, one a young lad still feeling his way into a Premier League career, both becoming larger and bolder than life itself right when their team needs them to be. Do Manchester City have anyone like that, I wonder?
And do Manchester City, or Chelsea for that matter, have anyone like Daniel Sturridge and Philippe Coutinho, who have known the frustration of watching from the sidelines with successive coaches distrusting their talent, itching to get a chance, a real chance, or players like Jordan Henderson and Lucas Leiva who have been written off and made into scapegoats in the past? Do they have players like that who have clawed and scratched to make it to here, to not only be a part of something real but to be front and centre in making it happen? How could they? When dropping £30m for a readymade, mint-condition superstar seems as easy as taking a chequebook out of your pocket and leaving the amount blank, why would you bother with rehabilitation or redemption? Why indeed. Our title rivals have something in common besides massive amounts of oil money: they both had Sturridge in their clutches, they both let him go, and they’re both wishing they had him now. On a quiet enough afternoon, relatively-speaking of course, he nonetheless almost scored with a back-heeled effort so audacious that I spent a good five minutes afterwards shaking my head in frustration that it hadn’t gone in. It would have broken English football, I think, and maybe it’s a good thing for Daniel that Roy Hodgson was down at Craven Cottage dodging stray(?) footballs like some kind of Carry-On caper because he surely wouldn’t be making the plane to Brazil had the England manager seen that. Seriously, I understand that cultured players like Hoddle and Barnes have had trouble in the England set-up in years gone by because of a tacit distrust of ability and flair. I thought that those days had gone but clearly they haven’t because mentioning this lad in the same breath as Danny Wellbeck and defining him as merely being “in-form” simply doesn’t cut it, I’m sorry. This lad is special and Brendan Rodgers has given English football a wonderful gift by taking him out of the clutches of the wealthy and stupid and giving him the platform to be outrageously brilliant, yet the usual suspects don’t seem to be able to see it. Their loss.
I get the feeling that, should these lads face a moment of truth, a gut-check, call it what you will, they’ll face it and stare it down together, as a team, as a “group”. No doubt in my mind. Should Manchester City or Chelsea face similar odds, I’m not so sure your Nasri’s and Fernandinho’s, your Willian’s and Etoo’s, could be relied upon in quite the same way. This team has been forged through wind and rain, through hardship and trial, and now a fanbase glimpsing history is joining in and making itself heard like never before. I’m now convinced that the togetherness, the bond of teammate and fan alike, is what will pull this team over the line and give it that extra advantage to make up for having Victor Moses where City have Edin Dzeko to come off the bench, where Chelsea have Schurrle. Most of all, this team has the best player and the best manager in the Premier League. Suárez’s goal yesterday was magic (how many times have we said that?) The slightest error was seized upon, two touches and he was gone, the finish (on his weaker foot, for fuck sake) sublime. Like the rest of this magnificent team, Suárez has had his bad times. I have zero sympathy with him over the bite or his carry-on in the summer, but he has emerged on the other side as a shoe-in for player of the year and perhaps a record-breaker too. He said he wanted Champions League football; now he’ll have it, the right way. Fortune favours the bold. That’s just one word you could use to describe Brendan Rodgers too. When Skrtel made that howler against Manchester City to deny Liverpool a deserved win over the reigning champions in August 2012, Rodgers stated that “there’s no blame to Martin Skrtel, I’d rather have players wanting to get on to the ball. The courage he has to get on the football and try to play is what is the most important thing”. When City arrive again in two weeks, they’ll be facing the culmination of that kind of vision. Rodgers has held his nerve at difficult times, he’s trusted his players, he’s trusted in his beliefs and the kind of football we saw yesterday is the reward, for both him and us, personified in drawing four Spurs players in before Flanagan’s turn and pass to Coutinho in acres of space, not to mention 19 year-old Raheem Sterling running the show and making an absolute fool of Kaboul in the first-half (leading to Suárez’s header) and Dembele in the second (no Scotty Parker to back you up this time, Moussa?) when as recently as January Rodgers was being asked about the possibility of allowing the player out on loan.
The manager has held his nerve with youth, with his beliefs, with players who had been written off, and it should come as no surprise that his team is holding theirs. It’s built in his image, after all. The smile near the end yesterday told you everything. He’s actually fucking enjoying this, the mad bastard! Well consider me a stark-raving lunatic then because I’m loving it too…