It has been the template for this derisory 2020/21 season – one step forward, two emphatically backwards. After the win over RB Leipzig in the Champions League, you could forgive Reds fans for feeling a tad more positive about their club – but such feelings were extinguished in dramatic fashion by the 0-2 defeat to Everton in the Merseyside derby last weekend.
Now that was more like it.
Trying to predict how Liverpool are going to play from game-to-game is proving to be a fool’s errand right now, and in midweek the Reds once again confounded expectations by comfortably defeating a very handy RB Leipzig outfit in the Champions League.
There was a moment during the 1-3 defeat to Leicester City on Saturday where the TV cameras panned to Jurgen Klopp on the sidelines, and he was shown head down chuckling to himself. It was the sort of chuckle you seen in films just before a character then bursts into tears.
While most Liverpool fans were thinking it, few truly wanted to admit that the club’s Premier League title defence was over. But Reds supporters have no choice now after the devastating 1-4 defeat to Manchester City on Sunday, which definitively showed the gulf in class between the two teams this term.
“The gap to City … I am manager of Liverpool and so I have to say we want to be champions, and of course we do, but you need games for it and we need performances for it and we don’t have that.”
Those were the words of Jurgen Klopp immediately after Liverpool’s 0-1 defeat to Brighton on Wednesday evening, with the German all but waving the white flag in his side’s quest to defend the Premier League title.
Seven days ago there was a certain doom and gloom around Anfield….what a difference a week can make! Liverpool were outstanding in victory at West Ham on Sunday, and it was a performance reminiscent of the Reds in their title-winning pomp – that bodes very nicely indeed.