Larry Ryan: Liverpool are better built for a world after perfection
Jurgen Klopp takes training at Melwood Training Ground. Picture: John Powell/Liverpool FC via Getty Images
We know that Liverpool lost last season’s title race by eight ‘expected points’. Though the sticklers for detail will tell you that they also won it by 18 actual points.
Somewhere in that 26-point swing might lie evidence that Jurgen Klopp overachieved wildly and the whole charade is about to unravel.
Or there might be the secret to his ‘sustainability policy’. And some guidance as to whether he can keep this show on the road.
Maybe Liverpool’s boffins are just better than the boffins who calculate expected goals — who wait until the ball arrives at the feet of Mo Salah 10 yards out before crunching their numbers.
We hear the Anfield analysts can estimate the probability of a goal being scored within the next 15 seconds, wherever the ball is on the pitch. So when Trent Alexander-Arnold has it 80 yards from goal, the Melwood mainframes might well be melting with expectancy. Or, equally, they may be flashing ‘danger here’ when the opposition clears a corner.
Has Pep Guardiola that sort of flood alert system in place at Manchester City? Or do Liverpool just have better flood defences?
And perhaps Liverpool are simply better at seizing the big moments, appreciating the value of them, rather than taking comfort in the numbers game bringing another opportunity along.
Whatever the reason, it was quite an achievement by Klopp, to win the league by 18 points, while rarely making things look all that easy.
Famously, Alex Ferguson wasn’t terribly impressed with Arsenal’s unbeaten Premier League season in 2003-04. “It wasn’t championship form, they had too many draws,” said Fergie, seeing enough, even in their finest hour, to know that Arsenal would never win it again.
Luckily for Klopp, and a superstitious, easily spooked people, Watford freed them of the curse of invincibility. And perhaps more importantly, Liverpool never got into the habit of making things look easy.
They didn’t draw much either, they just won, without having to be perfect, without needing to have the ball all the time, without needing a two-goal cushion going into the last five minutes.
They could defend by attacking, but they could also defend by defending, if the need arose. And in times of flood, Klopp could call on renowned German surfer Sebastian Steudtner — who has ridden the world’s tallest waves — to teach them to breathe underwater.
As the latter stages of the Champions League continue to show us, we are in football’s post-perfection era, where Pep Guardiola’s dreams of total control are evaporating. And we have gone back, to some extent, to the Gilesy way, of playing the game on its merits.
“What I want, my desire, is to have 100 per cent possession,” Pep said, five years ago, disappointed with his Bayern side’s efforts after a sloppy 5-1 win over Arsenal.
It’ll still take you a long way, the quest for perfection. But it has become a bit of a high-wire act too, for Pep, requiring outrageous levels of talent and choreography to achieve. No wonder he tried to get the perfect footballer back on board.
There were signs against Lyon that even Pep doesn’t truly believe in perfection any more. Maybe he is listening to the boffins and beginning to realise that danger is always just 15 seconds away.
Back at the Allianz Arena that night five years ago, Thiago Alacantra was the outstanding player, though he gave the ball away a couple of times, to Pep’s dismay.
Since Klopp must have detected some room for improvement in that alternative league table, Thiago will soon be at Anfield, by all accounts, and Klopp will have a throttle for his relentless machine, to exert a little bit more control. And that might be as close to perfect as anyone will get at the moment.
Beyond the big two, do we dare incur the wrath of Frank Lampard by factoring Chelsea into a title race?
It has been a magnificent seamless pivot for Lamps, from David O’Leary style big brother of the Blues babies, to magnetic svengali figure, attracting the world’s finest talent to south London via his sheer animal magnetism.
Now for the tricky third act, maintaining Chelsea’s plucky underdog status after splashing all that cash.
Whatever way it works out, there will be credit for Lamps. Though there should be some warning signs in one of the few genuinely frank exchanges in Amazon’s Tottenham documentary. In it, a cheesed off Ben Davies is listening to transfer speculation on the box and asks his tablemates in the Spurs canteen why there must always be new names coming through the door. "Why can't a player just be allowed to develop?”
Explaining this to the likes of Tammy Abraham and Mason Mount may be the biggest test of Lamps’ powers of persuasion this season.
Elsewhere, Brendan Rodgers’ grip on his narrative arc has loosened — a difficult thing to arrest, as he found at Anfield — while Ole has just about kept momentum going in the right direction.
The lapsed United faithful are still clambering back on board and while Ole has no designs on perfection, he is giving them some of the things they remember most fondly — attacking with pace, youth in the team, and a penalty every week.
With a view to adding trophies, the faithful are casting Bruno Fernandes as their Cantona figure, though that seems a heavy burden to carry for a lad who goes down so easily.
Mikel Arteta is making impeccable noises at Arsenal. But we don’t yet if he is truly building something, or has just turned Arsenal back into a cup team.
As for Tottenham, there are not many tactical insights in the Amazon show. “Don’t lose the ball doing shit,” has featured among Mourinho’s key instructions.
But they were looking for something bigger than tactical nous, when they swooped for Jose. They were ready to sell something, anything of themselves in exchange for silver. And we hear Jose repeat many times to his players the belief system he hopes can now take the club forward.
"Be a ****. Don’t be a good guy."
With the year ending in a one, just maybe we’ll soon see that embroidered beside the club badge instead of ‘To dare is to do’.
Mustn’t it be a tough gig all the same, selling sport? The people involved have to experience a certain helplessness, at times, as they wait around for a bit of magic that truly captures the imagination of the public.
Take the lads at Cricket Ireland, who no doubt do fine work all year round promoting the game. And yet last month it took Kevin O’Brien sending a six through the window of his own car for the ‘Inter-Provincial Series’ to get people ‘engaged’, as they say. The other seven sixes he blasted would have been no use to them, without the one that landed in his back seat.
And while they took their chance, when it came, got the pictures out there swiftly, and the quotes from Kevin, you couldn’t really build a marketing strategy around that class of thing, could you?
Just as you can’t really predict any more what might sell cycling. What could take youngsters back to an era where impromptu Tours took place through the housing estates and boreens of the land. And we all had chapter and verse, not just on Roche and Kelly, but how Vanderaerden had got on.
This week Sam Bennett somehow managed it. Was it the green jersey? Would becoming the sixth Irishman to win a Tour stage have cut it? Probably not.
The problem for cycling is that its phenomenal inhuman feats are no use to it any more, given the weary scepticism around the sport.
What cycling needed most was the tears of joy and disbelief from Bennett when he crossed the line first in Saint-Martin-de-Ré. It badly needed his fragile humanity.
