If someone had said ‘you’re going to finish second in the league to the team with the highest wage bill in football, you’ll only be two points behind them and you’ll have scored 101 goals and on the last day of the season you’ll still be in with a slim hope of the title’ you’d have taken it wouldn’t you?”
And he said, :”No, I’d have wanted first”
It’s an odd feeling, this deflation at not winning something that nobody expected us to be competing for. We set our stall out in August as ‘we want the top four, we want the Champions League again.’ We were scoffed at.
What we did this season was ridiculous, impossible, bizarre, unbelievable, unprecedented. We moved from seventh to second - and very nearly, oh so very nearly, first - we added 30 goals to last seasons tally we added 23 points, for the first time in Premiership history the top two goal scorers were from the same team (ours, obviously), we had the Players’ and Writers’ player of the year in the shape of a man who was reviled last summer and was expected to be at Real or Barca or (comedy bid alert) Arsenal, graceless idiots that they were. Their humiliation in a twenty minute Anfield blitz was no more than that £40m +1 fiasco merited - and don’t even get me started on the clowns who wanted us docked points for refusing to sell Luis to them.
The team was rebuilt in the shape of Suarez, in the madness and the creativity and desire and passion and refusal to give in and yes he’s not been in form for a month or so but Jesus look what he did this year.
It’s the second week of May, we’ve lost one game and drawn one game all year. Everything else has been victory. These runs don’t happen. And it may not have been enough in the end but when we were fifth in January did anyone see this coming?
But still the post mortem starts; Liverpool bottled it. Bottled it? Look at that record, does that look like bottling it to you? Delude yourself as much as you like, there was no lack of courage or conviction or fortitude here. The title was lost when Gerrard slipped, the title was lost when we allowed Palace back in after a 3 goal lead had been established. And yes, if Gerrard hadn’t slipped we’d have had a point against Chelsea - God knows they were never going to attack, thirty goals more than Chelsea’s bottomless coffers could provide this season - and if we hadn’t been chasing the concept of scoring more goals in the Palace game than anybody had ever seen before then maybe we’d have held that lead but we wanted glory, we demanded glory and the lads went for glory for us.
It doesn’t matter. Ultimately, if anything cost Liverpool this ridiculous, improbable 19th title - oh yeah, plane flying over Anfield yesterday ‘United 20 - Gerrard 0’, stay classy Manchester - it was the lack of depth in the squad. We’re ignoring the fact that City were able to spend the first third of the season fielding an unstoppable Negredo and when he tired, when he ran out of form, revert to Aguero and Dzeko. We had Aspas. This is what unlimited cash gets you, this is what Champions League attracts. Jose can whinge as much as he likes that not playing European football meant that Liverpool had it easy, were more capable of challenging for the title than his supposedly threadbare squad (how much was Matic?) but be honest, when has any team not playing European football challenged for the premiership?
There was a football match yesterday. We conceded an own goal, we knew that City had gone ahead, we knew that it was over, we came back and scored twice because we will not lie down, we will not accept defeat, we will not give in.
We have achieved more this season than you thought possible, than we thought possible, probably than the team thought possible. We have shown what we are and what we can be, we have embraced madness and gloried in it, celebrated it, we have welcomed the team on ‘normal’ match days with parades that dwarf those afforded to title winners, we have had the time of our lives.
And people talk of failure? There’s no failure here. Just glory. We have added a new sentence to our vocabulary in the last month, opposition fans deride it but we no longer care about the opinion of opposition fans, “We Go Again.”
We Go Again. Next year, next season, We Go Again.
We are Liverpool. You’re not, you never will be, you couldn’t do this, you couldn’t have the season we’ve had.
We Go Again.