All of Liverpool has waited for this moment for 30 years. OK, not all of Liverpool, but the biggest part, the portion of the city that prefers red to blue and considers Anfield to be sacred ground. These people waited three decades for their return to the very top of English soccer and maybe were just a few days away as March dawned.
And then the world stopped. Cold. OK, not all the world, but most of it, and certainly everything of consequence in regard to sport. The COVID-19 pandemic shut down the Premier League officially as of March 13. LFC’s derby game against Everton, which was scheduled three days later and might have contained the opportunity for Liverpool to clinch its first EPL title, was placed on hold.
Which has meant 30 years of waiting plus one month … two months … ultimately, three months and five days. Under visionary manager Jurgen Klopp, Liverpool had compiled 82 points through the first 29 games of the 2019-20 Premier League season. Second-place Manchester City had 57 through 28 games. Any subsequent combination of LFC victories and City defeats adding up to two would deliver the title to Liverpool. But there were no games to be won or lost. Imagine being that near to a dream, and that far away.
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“As we know by virtue of all the ways we haven’t won it, you don’t win the league at the last moment. You win the league over a long period of time,” Neil Atkinson, a writer and podcast host at The Anfield Wrap, told Sporting News. “So we have those big moments, and those moments were ours as far as winning the league. But in terms of the league suddenly disappearing, you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t feel like, ‘Oh, God, what next? What is going to turn up to stop us now?’ It does feel like: You name it, it’s lined up to stop us.
“People always react to things differently, but I think some people did find it a little bit of a blow.”
It’s going to happen now. It’s just a matter of negotiating the exact day and time. The Premier League returns today from its extended hiatus with two games: Aston Villa vs. Sheffield United and Manchester City vs. Arsenal. If Man City loses that game, Liverpool’s first opportunity to claim the title could come Sunday at Goodison Park.
Of all the ways in which Liverpool could clinch in this unprecedented season, the most fitting might be if the Reds defeat Everton and Man City handles Arsenal but then, somehow, finds a way to lose to Burnley on June 22. This would make Liverpool champions of England as they watch on television.
The most likely scenario, though, has Liverpool securing the title at Anfield on Wednesday, June 24 against Crystal Palace. Ordinarily, Atkinson would be in his seat around row 30 of the Dalglish stand, near the halfway line for that monumental occasion. Now, he will be watching from his home when Liverpool’s players assemble on the field and captain Jordan Henderson raises the Premier League trophy in a shower of confetti and cheers from his teammates, alone.
“I think it’s going to be, obviously, odd,” Atkinson told SN. “The pubs are unlikely to be open. If they are open, it will be outdoor space, and they’ll be very, very strict on numbers. I think that there won’t be a parade until the football team is ready for there to be one, and that will be going into next year. The manager said, ‘There will be a parade, but when we’re good and ready, we’ll decide.’ I think that’s great, that's a great attitude to have. There will be a party, but we’ll just have to wait for it, to an extent.”
When Liverpool visited the United States for preseason games last July, after a short offseason that followed their sixth UEFA Champions League title, the obsession with winning the Premier League almost was tangible. “We want to keep making history for this football club and this team, and I’m very confident we can do that,” Henderson said during a stop at Notre Dame.
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Liverpool owned a glorious history when the Premier League was launched as more or less a rebranding of England’s First Division in 1992-93, with 18 titles in their history and 11 in the previous 20 years, the most recent in 1990. But they’ve not won the league since. They finished second four times, three times under the Premier League banner.
They wound up seven points behind Arsenal in 2001-02 and four off Manchester United’s pace in 2008-09. The most painful was in 2013-14, when a rousing victory over Man City in early April put the Reds in command of the title race with four games remaining. In a home game against Chelsea, though, Steven Gerrard slipped in his own half and sent the ball rolling toward Demba Ba, who had no defender in front of him as he raced to slide a shot past LFC goalkeeper Simone Mignolet. Chelsea parked a bus full of players in front of its goal, and Liverpool could not rescue the draw it needed to remain on pace to win the Premier League.
Last year’s runner-up finish was nearly as painful, but the Reds performed so spectacularly the ache seemed less severe. The Reds did pretty much everything they could to win it. They lost only one game and accumulated 97 points, the third-highest total in the history of the league, but still they finished second to Manchester City’s 98. The Champions League victory superseded that disappointment, but it was right back on everyone’s agenda when the 2019-20 season began.
The team’s fixation on ending the title drought was obvious as Liverpool tied a record with 18 consecutive victories and went 27 games without a defeat. Man City performed well but kept dropping points with draws, allowing the LFC lead to burgeon until the season shut down in March.
There at least is some relief the title will happen. There was a moment during the quarantine when many Liverpool fans worried about whether forces beyond their control might conspire to erase everything that occurred in the 2019-20 season: the 27-1-1 record, the performance on course to set an all-time record for accumulated points, the league-best total of 21 goals allowed.
It always was a preposterous conceit, that a team that had earned a 25-point advantage over its closest competition would not eventually be crowned as champion, but there were those pushing with whatever political and psychic power they could muster to have the season declared “null and void.” It happened in the Netherlands, where the Eredivisie shut down operations for the 2019-20 season because of the pandemic and chose not to award a championship. That meant it wasn’t impossible.
There were fans of Liverpool’s rivals, who’ve longed delighted in the Reds’ dearth of Premier League titles, agitating for that outcome: Manchester United and Everton in particular. But also there were the teams presently occupying the final three positions in the standings: Norwich City, Aston Villa, Bournemouth. If the season were wiped out, they would not be relegated. That’s what prompted the legitimate concern.
“There were a lot of people who were trying to cry it in,” Atkinson said. “What that did was, that blocked the idea of having a proper discussion about what should happen next. I’ve got to be careful with this, because whether we like it or not, The Anfield Wrap is part of the media. But I think that in the United Kingdom, we have a media culture that fixates on the simple and does so repeatedly if it generates engagement, which it can do through people just taking extreme positions.”
Playwright Nicky Allt had a lot of success with the comedy “One Night in Istanbul”, which was built around Liverpool’s miraculous 2005 victory in the Champions League and later turned into a feature film. He says the long wait for this league title will make anything won by Klopp after this “bonus trophies” because “he’s brought us back to greatness” with the 2019 Champions League win and, soon, the Premier League title.
“I can remember exactly where I was when we won it in 1990,” Allt told Sporting News. “I stood drinking in the Salisbury Pub on Walton Breck Road and a mate said to me: ‘I’m emigrating to Australia now I’ve seen Liverpool win the lot!’ I haven’t seen him since that night. I sometimes thought he was the jinx, him moving away like that.
“I’ll be back in the same pub, now called The 12th Man, and I’ll basically be singing a load of songs and drinking a load of ale until I’m drunk.”
The ecstasy that will result from Liverpool’s trophy ceremony, whenever it arrives, ordinarily would be a massively collective enterprise. There would be the three dozen on the field comprising players and staff, but also 51,000 in the stands if it were to happen at Anfield. And then, in the immediate aftermath, probably a few hundred thousand flooding the streets. We saw last June what it looks like when Liverpool wins something big; the Reds’ sixth Champions League title compelled a parade the BBC estimated as drawing 750,000 to the city’s streets.
The club’s fan base spreads far beyond the walls of the stadium, even well beyond the city’s or nation’s borders. The Liverpool Football Club discussion group on Facebook contains recent comments from fans located in Pakistan, Malaysia, Northern Ireland and Ghana. Oddly, their experience of reveling from afar will be universal in 2020. Within the confines of those 90 minutes (plus injury time), they’ll be as close to the action as the lifers who usually jam into the Kop.
“It won’t have the same feeling or atmosphere, admitted,” Mark, a fan from South Africa, posted on Facebook. “But the fact that it will be our NINETEENTH time as top-flight victors will be all that matters.”
