Liverpool and Man City: An incalculable tragedy

IT'S May 2018 and Manchester City are in the dying seconds of their 38th Premier League game at Southampton. The title has been theirs for weeks but one goal at St Mary’s will take them to 100 points for the season, and make Pep Guardiola’s team the first top-flight in English football’s longer-than-any-other-country history to hit three figures. Jesus duly delivers in the 94th minute and the century is reached. Outlandish stuff. Brilliant and worrying in equal measure.

The crowning achievement of an almost flawless league campaign, and a 19 point advantage over Manchester United in second place (“one of my greatest achievements” according to Jose Mourinho; he may have been right).

Fast forward 11 months and we will not be seeing a team reach 100 points. Realism has returned to the Premier League. Or at least it would have if we were not heading towards a scenario where Liverpool may well finish on 97 points and come second. Already the only team in English top-flight history to lose just two games and not win the title (in 2008-09), Liverpool could end this campaign with just one defeat and still not be crowned champions.

We could get 97 points in the league, finish second and lose a CL final in one season. I would stop watching football forever if that happened. pic.twitter.com/VFbMztdwVl

— Pressure FC (@NewtonLWB) April 17, 2019

To say this title race between Jurgen Klopp’s team and Manchester City is the most extreme ever seen in England is an understatement. 14 years ago Chelsea clocked up 95 points, with manager Jose Mourinho saying “It is an unbelievable record, 95 points is a lot of points.” In 2019 it might get you third place.

If City and Liverpool do indeed end on 98 and 97 points then they will shatter the previous combined record for the top two, currently held, based on three points for a win, by Arsenal and Leeds in 1970-71. That campaign, though, is the lowest scoring top-flight season in English history with a grim average of only 2.36 goals per game, and Liverpool matches that term averaging only 1.57, the lowest rate ever seen in England’s top division. 2018-19, in contrast, has seen 2.83 goals per game and is on course to be have the highest average since the 1960s.

The fact that this season seems destined to join last year and 2016-17 in the top six for combined points by the top two clubs is an indication that this is a trend rather than an anomaly. In 1996-97 only 35 points separated champions Manchester United and the relegation zone at the end of the season. As it stands there are 38 points between Liverpool and Leicester in seventh place, with that margin likely to grow even further in the next few weeks. It’s telling that most of the clichés we have about league football are based on the idea that it’s a long period of time during which teams will come in and out of form.

It’s a marathon, not a sprint: not any more, it’s both.

Squeaky bum time: title challengers are now as afraid of dropping points in early winter as they are in April. Jordan Pickford’s handing of two points to Liverpool in December was instantaneously seen as potentially pivotal.

You can’t judge the table too early: since Mourinho joined Chelsea in 2004, Premier League winning teams have averaged 14 points from their first six games. The days of Derby winning only one of their opening half dozen in 1974-75, or Liverpool winning two in each of 1979-80 and 1981-82, or even Manchester United winning two in 2002-03, are gone.

Should Liverpool win against Cardiff on Sunday they’ll have a better record, based on three points for a win, than 93 previous champions of England, 50 of whom had 42 games to gather points from. And yet depending on what a bruised Manchester City have done against Tottenham a day earlier the Reds might still be second favourites to win the league. These are extraordinary times and whoever does come second won’t have bottled it, they’ll be the greatest runners-up the game has ever seen.