Robert O’Connor looks at how Liverpool need to avoid letting their long unbeaten run get in the way of their primary objective of winning the Premier League.
Defeat is coming for Liverpool
38 games. 377 days. And counting. One calendar year and one full season’s worth of games in the world’s most competitive division, playing every week against athletes who command the highest transfer fees, rake in the best wages and who boast the most refined technique and relentless stamina. And still, Liverpool have not lost. Not once. But still, it's coming.
Since Jurgen Klopp’s team were last beaten in a league game – a 2-1 reverse against Manchester City at the Etihad Stadium on (checks notes) 3 January 2019 – 12 top-flight managers have been sacked in England. Two of those clubs – Watford and Huddersfield – are on their third boss in that time. Sheffield United, sixth in the Premier League and against whom the Reds secured the calendar-year record at the start of January, were sixth in the Championship the last time Liverpool walked away from a league game empty handed.
VAR has been introduced and become universally loathed, a new Premier League broadcaster has arrived, and the league’s record winning-margin has been equalled. There is a new record overseas scorer, and Man City have become the first English team to win a domestic treble. More than 15 million spectators have passed through the turnstiles of Premier League grounds since the beginning of 2019. And Liverpool have not lost.
The ethereal unbeaten season, briefly made flesh in 2004 when Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal did what everyone outside of Highbury said was un-doable, is at heart little other than a statistic, a pure kind of achievement, a garnish. Arsenal won the title by 11 points in 2003/04. Of the 12 games the team drew, they could have lost 10 and still been champions by a clear point. The 'unbeaten' part of the unbeaten season was a flourish, sumptuous to the eye but thinner than air, as valuable in the final reckoning as the Panenka or the Rabona. It was so ostentatious as to be almost contemptuous. Sir Alex Ferguson even found cause to jibe, possibly tongue in cheek, that Arsenal's record suggested an overly cautious style of play.
Records win nothing
The unbeaten record won nothing, yet it’s the first thing that history remembers; before Thierry Henry’s goals, ahead of Patrick Vieira’s balletic stride, in front of Robert Pires’s genius and Gilberto Silva’s transcendental, Buddhist-like discipline.
Instead, the annals remember simply The Invincibles, an achievement defined as much by what the opposition failed at as the performances of those in Arsenal red; Ruud van Nistelrooy’s stoppage-time missed penalty at Old Trafford (game number six of the record-breaking 49), Aiyegbeni Yakubu’s fluffed lines in the final minutes for Portsmouth at Fratton Park in April when the new champions were clinging to their record for dear life, Clinton Morrison’s air-shot for Birmingham from six-yards out at Highbury a week before. All had their finger on the trigger, before letting the Gunners scurry away with their immortality in tact.
Like any great sporting achievement, it comes in stages. At first, it seems like a fantasy, titillation for the pundits and speculation amongst the diehard and the terminally optimistic. Then, a certain checkpoint is passed, and something in the air changes.
For Arsenal’s class of ’04, it came at match number 30, the point at which the record for number of games without defeat at the start of season fell. The game was a 1-1 draw against Manchester United at Highbury – Van Nistelrooy again blew the chance to wreck the Gunners’ record with a late header planted into the arms of Jens Lehmann from close range. It was the moment when dreams hardened into plans.
Similarly, when Leicester City won the title in 2016, a kind of point of no return was reached when the team won 3-1 away at Manchester City in February. The challenge became crystalised, distilled down from the ludicrous - ‘win the title’ - to the tantalizingly obtainable - ‘win eight more games and you’ll win the title’. The equation becomes simplified, a sense of destiny moves in where before there had been wishful thinking and nagging doubt.
Can Man Utd ruin Reds’ record run?
Liverpool face Manchester United on Sunday, the same team that shattered Arsenal's hopes of going 50 games unbeaten in 2004 (that fans mourned the team's failure to reach the half-century re-emphasized football's peculiar obsession with arbitrary landmarks). Now, for the second time, United find themselves with the chance to shatter the dreams of their most arch rivals.
United, of course, are the only team to have taken points off Klopp's team this season, otherwise we might have been talking about an even more absurd ambition, the first 100% winning season. But then the uncomfortable paradox about monumental sporting streaks is that they tend to generate their own unique form of distraction. The points build up, but so too does a fixation, an overpowering obsession with keeping the run alive, with invincibility. Once it's gone, it leaves a sucking vacuum where once there was indomitable belief.
If Liverpool keep the run going, they will go into April's return visit against City at the Etihad knowing they must avoid defeat to equal Arsenal's record. It's far from inconceivable that victory will hand them the title right there on the champions' patch, with six games still to spare. Win every game between now and then, and they will almost certainly arrive in Manchester already champions. All mind-bending possibilities. And yet seemingly somehow peripheral detail to the central aim of ending a 30-year wait for the league crown.
Sky Sports' Martin Tyler said in the preamble to that famous mud-bath at Old Trafford in October 2004, when Arsenal blew their chance at a half-century in a foul, bad-tempered game: "you get nothing extra for 50 games unbeaten." Perfectly true. Indeed, when Wayne Rooney slotted home United's second goal to seal a 2-0 win, Wenger's team all of a sudden looked strangely artificial, like an ageing body kept alive beyond its proper time by meddlesome scientists for the purpose of experimentation, a kind of fatal curiosity to see how far a living thing could bare the Sisyphean punishment of living on and on, and on, unable to expire. Arsenal were horribly weakened by the pain of that defeat, falling fast and hard out of the title race. They haven't won the Premier League since.
Competitive sport is designed in such a way as to make defeat sooner or later inevitable. Dodge it for too long, and the athlete's mind forgets how to bare up in the face of it, the collective chemistry altered, the DNA weakened and unravelled.
So believe it - defeat is coming for Liverpool. The only question is what kind of animal they will be after it bites them.
