Gary Neville has hinted that Chelsea and Tottenham have a real chance of lifting the Premier League title this season, claiming Liverpool's defensive injuries has opened the door to new challengers.
Liverpool and Manchester City have dominated the league for the past two seasons and it had been expected their stranglehold would continue into the 2020/21 campaign. City, however, have won just three of their first eight matches, while Liverpool have also shown signs of vulnerability.
Jose Mourinho's Tottenham currently top the division after a flying start, and Frank Lampard's Chelsea sit third - just two behind Spurs and Liverpool.
The Reds, of course, will be without first-choice defensive duo Virgil van Dijk and Joe Gomez for the bulk of the season, and Neville feels that could give the London clubs the impetus to challenge the status quo.
“Is it a season where Lampard and Jose Mourinho could be up against each other in a title race? We’d never have thought it,” he said on Sky Sports' creatively-named Gary Neville Podcast.
“We thought Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp, it would just be a two horse race. Then, having watched City in the first two weeks of the season, I thought Liverpool would just run away with it. But not now, not with the Van Dijk injury, I just think that exposes them a lot more.”
It should be noted that the episode was recorded before Liverpool's victory over Leicester, where without Van Dijk, Gomez, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Jordan Henderson or Mohamed Salah, they dented the Foxes' own title hopes with a convincing 3-0 win.
Sunday's emphatic victory reinstalled the defending champions as many people's favourites, but they have questions left to answer. The humiliating 7-2 defeat to Aston Villa shattered their mirage of invincibility, but they have conceded just five times in the eight games since, even though they've been without Van Dijk for the most part.
Source : 90min