With Arsenal annihilating Chelsea on Tuesday night, giving themselves some much required day light at the top of the Premier League table, the onus was on Liverpool to get a win over their Merseyside neighbors, Everton, to return to pole position alongside Arsenal, and Jurgen Klopp’s side was boosted with the returns of core first team members, Mo Salah, Darwin Nunez, Dominik Szoboszlai and Alexis MacAllister.
Liverpool had the lion’s share of possession as expected, but like recent times, their profligacy get the better of them again with regular missing customer, Nunez, spurning a glorious chance, as well as Luis Diaz. Salah had a lot of sniffs at goal, but most went wide off the mark. The first goal came from an unlikely source, Jarrad Branthwaite, but the VAR review for the goal was unnecessarily long. The second half header from Dominic Calvert-Lewin was the nail in the coffin, but the defending, especially from a maestro like Virgil van Dijk, was rather shocking.
Liverpool’s loss to Everton in the Premier League had a significant impact on both sides of the table, with Sean Dyche’s side currently eight points clear of relegation, despite their eight point deduction, and more importantly, Liverpool three points behind Arsenal at the top of the table.
In as much as it seems like they are potentially out of the Premier League title race, there has been a lot of drama, and Klopp touched on it,
“I can’t say now that we are still fully in it. We need a crisis at Man City and Arsenal and we need to win football games because if they start losing all their games and we do what we did tonight then nothing changes. We are not safe in the Champions League qualification as well so we should just play better football. That would be really good.”
Klopp calls it ‘crisis’, I call it drama.
Tonight, FA Cup finalists, Manchester City, visit the American Express Stadium to take on Brighton, and we will be hoping for more drama. Pep Guardiola has bemoaned the physical demands required from his players,
“Not just in the legs, more they were tired in the head. These guys have three weeks off, one month , not much rest to recover. People say: ‘Ah, I complain.’ But I defend my players, I know what I’m talking about, much better than the people outside.
“Science says you need a certain time to recover, not just physically – mentally as well. And for many years we don’t give them that but still we are there. That’s why I say I’m really impressed but all the time I’m thinking: ‘They will fall down.”
Well, I am certainly up for this, but I’d take it with a pinch of salt because it’s Manchester City. Season in, season out, Manchester City turns into a juggernaut at this point in the campaign, and go ahead to smash teams apart on their way to winning yet another Premier League trophy. In the last 10 seasons, they have won six league titles, which includes three in a row for the last campaigns. They have pretty much evolved to become the final boss of the Premier League.
This is indeed the mother of all Premier League title challenges, and whoever ends up as champions at the end of the season certainly deserves it, especially with the added pressure of other title rivals bearing down for the right to be the best team in the division.
Sayonara.