If We Don’t Win The League…
Untempered honesty is considered a quirk of the Dutch national character. That being the case, it seems almost inevitable that Arne Slot would get his first red card from reacting to officiating he’s forced to endure as Liverpool’s head coach. Welcome to the Premier League, Arne.
READ MORE: There’s Only One Mohamed Salah by Jack Champagne
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Red Card, Red Flag
What Slot told Michael Oliver exactly to earn a straight red was highly anticipated news. The gaffer seemed relatively calm during the exchange. It came as some surprise that he copped to having let his emotions get the better of him. The FA’s rendering of the statement was “If we don’t win the league, I’ll f’n blame you.” Slot disputes the precise wording, but fully acknowledges the substance of the statement. Slot is too much of a professional to express anything but remorse about what he said. Nevertheless, he said out loud what many Liverpool fans are no doubt thinking.
There’s been a frankly embarrassing race to qualify for what seems almost certain to be a Liverpool title this season. The refs favor Liverpool! Liverpool has been too lucky with injuries! The League is too easy this season! Liverpool have been too lucky with fixtures! Every excuse is as absurd as it is insulting. Rival fans and even some neutrals seem to regard a Liverpool title as a fate worse than death. That leaves that bunch doing everything they can to attach an asterisk to the affair. The pandemic provided a ready-made excuse for the last one, despite the lockdown not meaningfully altering a result decided well in advance. But no such convenience exists this time around, leaving the naysayers to concoct new ones on the fly.
An Invisible “Bias”
The notion that Liverpool has been favored at all in the officiating in this season is laughable. Critics will point to a rough shove here or there by one of our center-backs (or Darwin Nunez when he’s feeling cheeky), which is certain to be read as organized favoritism by anyone with Liverpool Derangement Syndrome. Meanwhile, anyone actually watching Liverpool without the distorting bias of Red Hatred would see things differently. If anything, one must concede that the officiating at the Goodison Derby was a disgrace. Liverpool were penalized for so much as looking at the ball, receiving more than twice as many foul calls as Everton.
Certainly, for every questionable shove Ibrahima Konate has gotten away with, one can find a dozen examples of Mohamed Salah getting manhandled without so much as a whistle being blown. The Tomkins Times, in its typically objective, data-driven fashion, has identified this as a trend across Liverpool games. In proportion to Liverpool’s possession and offensive intensity, they are outliers in terms of bearing the weight of penalties, especially compared to Arsenal and Man City, who are similar in terms of their offensive stats. This is a trend Paul Tomkins has tracked since 2022. This should be alarming considering how narrowly we lost the league in two of the seasons in that time frame.
The Down Year
The notion that this Premier League has been “too easy” is an insult not just to what Liverpool has accomplished this season, but to what every successful side has accomplished. Brighton, Bournemouth, Aston Villa, Fulham, Newcastle, and especially Nottingham Forest have done their damnedest to ensure that this League has been far from easy. The race for European soccer has a truly enormous number of teams still in contention. The average gap for teams from tenth to the last Champions League spot is a mere three points. The gap between the bottom half and Champions League qualification is comparable to the gap between first and second.
The only place where the league isn’t competitive is at the rock bottom of the table. That’s precisely because this year’s league is too tough for the promoted sides to reliably snatch their much-needed survival points. Certainly, Liverpool has made the league look easy by virtue of their commanding league and massive unbeaten run. Yet, every team at the top has endured their share of upsets. Bournemouth in particular has taken points off of every team above them on the table (except Liverpool, of course). Forest’s fairytale comeback from being relegation candidates last season is sure to go down in history. Newcastle managed to snatch their first trophy in 70 years by defeating Chelsea, Arsenal, and yes, even Liverpool along the way.
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We have been upset a number of times, despite what the lack of league losses would suggest. Our draws against Everton, Fulham, Newcastle, Manchester United, and Aston Villa were hard-fought. The fact that even a leader as imperious as Liverpool have been can’t guarantee victory should be every indication of how “easy” this season has been.
One of the more telling pieces of commentary came from former SkySports talking head Richard Keyes, who claimed “There hasn’t been a genuine challenger to Arne Slot’s team this season.” His conclusion from this statement is that Liverpool has dominated the Premier League by being “merely average,” which is a frankly puzzling piece of reasoning. Liverpool’s early successes were qualified with this; “they haven’t played anybody yet” being the running joke of the season. But there’s simply no sustaining that notion at this point in the season.
Hiccups Came All At Once
The league phase in Europe saw us contest a nearly invincible run. The only hiccup was a throwaway match against PSV that would not have meaningfully affected our standing anyway. Said invincible run had us maintain clean sheets against German champions Bayer Leverkusen, fresh off an invincible domestic season whose first loss across all campaigns came in the Europa League final. We effortlessly demolished Real Madrid, the defending champions of both Spain and Europe. At home, our only defeat thus far this season has come from a Nottingham Forest side that has shown remarkable consistency in punching above their weight.
That unbeaten run included two matches against Manchester City in which they failed to score even once. We drew with an aspiring Fulham side capable of defeating the likes of Forest and Chelsea while playing three-quarters of the game with only ten men. No one competing for Champions League qualification besides Forest has beaten us yet. If we haven’t played anyone yet, there’s simply no one in the world to play.
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It’s impossible to quantify luck with injuries, but we’ve endured long stretches without Alisson Becker, Ibrahima Konate, and Diogo Jota. All of whom are Slot’s first choice in their respective positions. Granted, those losses didn’t affect us as much as they could have. That is simply a testament to Liverpool’s brilliance in squad development. The fact that we did not collapse the same way Manchester City did without Rodri is not luck. Arsenal have certainly been hard done by in terms of their injuries, but they had fallen quite far behind even before then, and couldn’t beat us at full strength anyway. We’ll likely be without Trent Alexander-Arnold for the run-in, so we’ll see how much our “luck” with injuries is worth as we close out the season.
When We Do (Or Don’t) Win The League
In the final analysis, if Liverpool wins the league, it will be for one reason and one reason only. It will be because Liverpool is far and away the best team in England, the best team in Europe, the best team in the world. That’s a tough pill for rivals to swallow, but no other explanation accounts for the evidence. Our setbacks in Europe and in the FA Cup and EFL Cup are hard reminders that Liverpool is not unbeatable. But that simply helps to contextualize what a massive achievement our command of the league title is.
]If we don’t win the league, it won’t be because the squad isn’t good enough, or that Arne Slot is a fraud, or that Liverpool have overperformed their ability. It will be entirely due to factors outside of the control of anyone at the wheel. One can understand Arne Slot’s frustration at losing two points to officiating incompetence in this light. The notion that the hard work of building such a dominant position can be unraveled in an instant by the sheer stupidity of the man in a yellow shirt would drive anyone insane. Our lead at this stage is commanding, but not unassailable. The Goodison Derby should be evidence that we can’t take anything for granted, even at this stage.
But if we don’t win the league, at least we’ll know who to blame.
