WHEN it comes to stealing a living, few people pull it off as well as certain football pundits. I’m not talking about the ones who make predictions about particular football matches that end up going spectacularly wrong — that can happen to the best of us. I’m talking about the ones that don’t even bother to think about facts before opening their mouths.
The thing that’s set me off about pundits this time is the BT Sport conversation regarding Liverpool having had a ‘poor year’. It was Jermaine Jenas who said it, but only Chris Sutton made any concerted effort to pick him up on it. It’s been the media narrative about us this season, that we’ve had a ‘poor’ one. This appears to be based around the manner in which our season fell apart in January and it’s certainly true that the second half of the season has been disappointing in comparison to the first. Seasons don’t last for 19 games, though. The only thing you can do is look at a season as a whole and make a judgement at the end of it.
Right now Manchester United fans will feel that they’re on course for a decent season. What happens if Ajax beat them in the Europa League final, however? If that happens then they’ll have won a League Cup and likely finished sixth. Suddenly, based on one game, they’ll have gone from having a good season to having a relatively poor one. All of this under the management of ‘world class’ José Mourinho, in charge of the most expensive squad in the history of the Premier League.
Meanwhile, at the Emirates, Arsene Wenger may well end up seeing Arsenal miss out on a top four finish for the first time since 1996. If he wins the FA Cup, is that enough to ensure that his season is seen as a successful one? The planes flying over the grounds his team have been playing at would suggest otherwise. Unlike Jürgen Klopp, the Frenchman has had years to get his team looking exactly the way he wants it to. He’s got Alexis Sanchez. He’s got Mesut Özil. He’s got a solid squad that’s built up over time and yet there isn’t as much pontificating over the success of his team this year as there is over Klopp’s.
Harry Redknapp, who spent most of the segment on BT Sport spinning around on his chair in an attempt to do a passable impression of Alberto Moreno on the substitute’s bench, doesn’t think we’ve improved much since the days of Brendan Rodgers. I wrote last week about why it’s so ridiculous to compare the record of the two managers, so I won’t go over that ground again. What I will say, though, is that when the BT Sport group had their discussion we were already eight points better off than in Rodgers’ final full season. After our win over West Ham we moved to being 11 points better off and if we beat Middlesbrough it will be 14 points. In short — yes, we’ve improved.
We’ve improved on last season, too. We’re currently 13 points better off than last year and could end the season with an improvement of 16 points. Frankly, I can’t even begin to get my head around the idea that some people who work in the football industry can even try to paint this league campaign as ‘poor’. If we qualify for the Champions League then we’ll have done something we’ve only achieved once since Rafa Benitez left the club. Even if we somehow don’t end up in the top four we’ll still have gained more points than all but one of our seasons since 2009.
Here’s a fact for you, courtesy of the always excellent Andrew Beasley: since the Premier League began, we have notched up more points than this time around on just five occasions. Beat Boro and we’ll match our 76-point total of 2007-8, while if we go on a rout and win by six or more, then we’ll actually beat that tally in terms of goal difference. There is no measure by which a serious person can say that this has been a poor season for Liverpool Football Club.
Has it been a frustrating season? Absolutely. When we beat Manchester City on New Year’s Eve we moved four points clear of them and many people felt we were in a title race. In some respects, we were. Yet here’s something not many people are going to want to hear — we weren’t really. We were still six points behind Chelsea at that point. As Mr. Beasley pointed out to me, we enjoyed our best ever first half of a season by notching up 43 points, yet over the course of the season Chelsea have doubled that tally and then some with one game still to play.
Everyone agrees that we had an awesome start to the season but we could have repeated that result-for-result in the second half of the campaign and still ended up seven points behind the title winners. If you think that ‘keeping pressure on them’ would have made them crack then you need to remember that Spurs won nine games in a row yet might still finish seven points shy of their London rivals. Sometimes you just have to accept that a team is deserving of the title and that is most certainly the case with Chelsea this year.
One of BT Sport’s arguments is that we had no European football, therefore we should have done better than we have. Personally, I think Leicester’s success last year has lulled people into thinking winning the league is easy if you don’t have European football. Prior to the Foxes win, no side had won the title without having finished in the top four the year before. Chelsea’s repeating of that success this time around is more to do with how much they’d downed tools under Mourinho last year than anything else. They’re still one of the most expensive squads in the Premier League, after all.
Since the start of March we’ve won 24 points from a possible 33. During that time we’ve played Arsenal, Manchester City and Everton as well as away games against typically tricky opposition such as West Brom and Stoke. Stretch that point-scoring out over the course of 38 games and we’d have notched up 83 points. Our win over West Ham meant we had won four away games in a row for only the third time in a decade, according to Dan Kennett. Have we had a ‘poor’ end to the season, or is that just confirmation bias from those that want to suggest that we’ve not been good enough?
Losses to Burnley, Bournemouth, Swansea and Crystal Palace are extraordinarily frustrating, there’s no getting away from that. Turn all four of them into wins and we’re still five points behind Chelsea right now. Since the Premier League began, only one team has gone all season unbeaten. It is a fact that teams drop points. Even Antonio Conte’s all-conquering side that is due to finish on over 90 points has lost five times. If we’d have lost to Arsenal or Manchester United instead then fans would be less disappointed, yet our top four finish would actually be in more jeopardy.
Pundits and journalists have long let Mourinho get away with spouting whatever bullshit he wants. Even know most people in the profession are happier to question his Pravda-style mouthpiece in Duncan Castles than they are to pull the man himself up on his nonsense. He’s been the king of distraction ever since he arrived in England, but he doesn’t even need to distract people at the moment. The likes of Jenas are busy saying that Klopp’s had a poor season while the ‘Special One’ spends all this money with little reward and no one says anything because Paul Pogba’s got a hashtag.
There are aspects of this season that have been immensely frustrating. But if you have played football at any level and are getting paid to say that we’ve had a poor season then I’m afraid you’re absolutely stealing a living. Let’s get three points against Middlesbrough, get back into the Champions League and shove these miserable sods’ words back down their throat.
Up the ‘poor’ Reds.
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We could finish the last third of the season with a record of W8 D3 L1…not sure how that is crap on any level.
Unfortunately it seems these pundits are confusing performance with results, hence the “limping home” comments, without actually noticing in these last 12 games we’ve only really been in any trouble in one game – the palace home defeat. They fail to notice the clear change in Klopp’s philosophy since around February – a more pragmatic approach to get as many 3 points in the bag as we could get and be damned with how we do it, yet Conte gets lauded for changing his approach at Chelsea after a bad spell back in September (without them seeming to realize 3 at the back was always going to come in at Chelsea, its what Conte does – so it was hardly a eureka moment one night in the pub for old Antonio).
These lads have played football and should understand how a season evolves between August and May, yet rather than using insight to dispel myths and bullshit, they seem to be hell bent on perpetuating the narrative and I really don’t know why.
We were being spoken of by both pundits and fans from many clubs as the side playing the best football, we went top as late as November 6th after a 6-1 demolition, however our injury woes started that day and we never saw the big 6 playing together again. Apart from the Suarez season we haven’t played footy that good since the late 80’s.
It’s difficult to assess our success this season until after our last game. Same with Utd and Arsenal.
We could finish 3/4th gaining the most points we’ve had in a decade bar our 2 title challenging years. It’s would definately point to progress. However a lack of silverware is a bugbare once again.
Utd could win a European trophy, a domestic cup and qualify for the CL which is a pretty good season that the vast majority of teams would accept. Or they could lose the final and therefore no CL.
Arsenal could still win the FA cup and qualify for the CL if we fuck up.
A lot can change in how a teams seasons can be assessed in just one or two games.
Our season went off the rails completely over a 5/6 week period because of injuries, Manes unavailability and the confusion around Matip. That fucked our title challenge up and dumped us out of both domestic cups.
We could and should have bought another attacker in Jan or at the very least utilised Sakho and Markovic better. Both would have proved useful in the final months and I’m
confident we’d be sitting 3rd or higher with maybe a cup in our pocket.
This January thing is quite interesting. For league only – we only lost Mane for 2 games and Matip for 3. And 2 of those games were against United and Chelsea which we drew. The other being Swansea.
So the reasons around how much that period fucked our league up might be a bit overstated, and cup games with mainly young lads or fringe players getting a run out seem to cloud things.
The games in February where we lost 2 out of 3 – the only regular first teamer missing was Lovren.
It would seem we simply went a bit shit and not really injury/ban/ACN related at all.
We only lost Mané for 2 games?
Was he not unavailable for the entire month of Jan?
He missed more than 2 games mate.
We also had Coutinho missing for a lot if not all of that 5/6 weeks period.
Pretty sure there was injuries to Lovren too.
League…..united and Swansea.
Played agst Sunderland and was available for chelsea
And we had Henderson playing….we need to stop finding these excuses and accept we hit a shit patch…just like city spurs arsenal all did at points this season.
We had 9 games in Jan…
DDLDWLLLD
We then covered Feb with..
DLWL
2 wins in 2 months
That’s what killed our season.
I was referring to the league
Read what I posted
I did.
You’re wrong.
One interesting point is that we are top of the Fairplay table for this season with one more game to go.
We definitely have improved on pitch performance while doing it with a fair sportmanship.
(2nd: Swans, 3rd: Bournemoth, 4th: Spurs, 5th: Southampton). All football playing sides.
Jenas in common with most jumped up so called pundits is a prat. I have been as frustrated as most at times this season but do describe the season as a whole as poor is ridiculous.
Jenas is a prime example of The Equine Paradox: There seems to be thousands more horse’s arses in the world than there are horses.
Jenas’ comments after Spurs defeat to Chelsea in the FA Cup tells you all you need to know about this footballing superbrain.
Fuck them, frankly.
Great article, no matter what happens now we’ve made good progress this year
Grew up with Jenas used to hang about with him a lot when we were kids/teens
His Dad is a Spurs fan and Jermaine was a Liverpool fan growing up, infact he got me following them when the team had the likes of Barnes, Rush etc.
I saw him last year and reminded him that I had been following Liverpool since he had me watching games with him. I took the opportunity to ask how it worked with him, was he a Spurs fan? a Forest fan (our hometown) or still a ‘pool fan? His response was that Forest will always be in his heart. He follows all teams the teams he has previously played but yes, he was still a Liverpool fan.
Hearing him say Liverpool had been poor this season made me livid!
Teams have poor games and good games – a majority of football our boys have played this season has been fantastic, we’ve dominated games even if we haven’t always come out with the result we deserved. The first half of the season was 2014 reimaged.
This season has been successful in entertaining me – imaging supporting and watching teams like West Brom or Everton week in, week out! The cherry on top would be that top four place. It is progress we’re making and I can see the ball kicking and running our boys are doing has purpose and is developing into an identifiable “Liverpool” style. The only unfortunate characteristic of that style is that we fail to turn up and beat the teams that sit in and park the bus!
To be honest though, a lot of these pundits and tv ‘experts’ are (forgive me) a bit ‘thick’ to say the least. Just because someone has played the game at a decent level it doesn’t automatically equate that he/ she has great reasoning or an anylitical nature. Hell, a lot of the journalists you see on the Sunday Supplement seem completely susceptible to the prevailing narratives. There are exceptions of course but to put it bluntly, most of these people are complete d**kheads. They care nowt’ for intelligently arrived at conclusions because they are always fearful of not ‘standing out’, ironically this seems to lead to them ALL agreeing on some contrary nonsense, devoid of any context.