A season which had an eerie resemblance to 2014-15 is finally over for Liverpool. The opportunity to reset must be taken……
In 2015, Sachin Nakrani and I wrote a book, ‘We’re Everywhere, Us’ about the 2014-15 season. Our idea was to carry the flame of excitement from the 2013-14 season and write a match-by-match report of the following campaign which would chronicle Liverpool’s inevitable title win.
Talk about cursed.
Liverpool were abject in 14-15. Dire. It was hard to work out what the low point was as there were so many candidates. Maybe the FA Cup semi-final defeat to Aston Villa where we played midfielders up front and left a striker on the bench. Or, of course, the humiliating nadir that was Stoke 6-1 on the last day of the season.
Having read those chapters back, it’s clear that I saw Stoke as the final insult. I wrote:
‘This season just looks like mush with targets not met, players being played out of position and absolutely no passion once things go wrong. I want a new Liverpool. I want a Liverpool which is infuriated when it goes behind. I want a Liverpool which shrugs off criticism and is unharmed by troublesome squabbles with wantaway players. I want a Liverpool which won’t settle for the top four and wants to be top of everything. Then to have the urge, the passion, to do it again the year after. I don’t want to be a party to sponsorship deals sold as news, to nice PR pieces about the players or excuses, excuses, f__ing excuses.’
It’s good to see we’ve moved on.
Even the troublesome squabbles with wantaway players struck an eerie chord.
I also call for a new day. I’d been listening to Cuyahoga by R.E.M from their album Life’s Rich Pageant and the opening line had resonated with me.
‘Let’s put our heads together/Start a new country up.’
Well, quite.
The middle eight of that song reads: ‘Rewrite the book and rule the pages/Saving face/secured in faith/Bury, burn the waste behind you.’
It’s time to put 2025-6 away. It’s even time to put Jürgen Klopp away and confine him to history. Take a picture here. Take a souvenir. It’s time to start a new country up.
We’ve little choice anyway. Mo and Robbo have gone, leaving just Alisson and Virgil left from the team which carried a huge trophy off a Madrid pitch in 2019. They too will be looking elsewhere before too long.
Rewrite the book and rule the pages.
No one likes a Day 1. It’s the hardest point of any journey with things more likely to go wrong than right, but it’s also a line in the sand. Liverpool are entirely without character now. A blank page. No one trusts anyone else, the fans are at each other’s throat and no one, literally no one, is saying ‘We do this now.’ It’s time to put an end to that and this blanket fury.
Scary, yes, but also an opportunity. Like Brendan Rodgers before him it’s difficult to assess what a par Arne Slot season looks like. For a league title and an empty hole of a season read Rodgers 2013-15 seasons. The wheat and the chaff blown up in technicolour.
Slot, Hughes and Edwards have 55 weeks of contract to go so they either begin again or hand it over to someone with an idea of what happens next. Jürgen Klopp came in and built the Liverpool world anew. No one’s saying that’s easy and there’s huge mitigation for Slot’s awkward second album, but there has to be both character and a plan to drag us out of this fug, this swamp.
Liverpool lost 12 league games last season. Defeats were normalised by March. Standards have dropped to that degree. That has to be the first change.
Whether you’re with or against the manager (and that ‘change the world in 55 weeks’ thing makes me sceptical to say the least), we have to look at a strategy to overcome whatever the hell that season was supposed to be. The players included. No matter how safe they feel from an Instagram comments section, they have to look at themselves and remember who they play for. They can start by trying to do so with each other.
But that was last year and that’s gone now. Start again. Build again. Just mark this as the point where someone stands up and takes the reins.
Take a picture here. Take a souvenir.
