(On Soccer)
Sometimes the simplest explanation reveals the whole picture. Or almost everything. There is no great mystery as to why Liverpool will likely lose their crown as reigning Premier League champions before the first flowers of spring arrive. There is little need to examine the performances for any lack of character, imagination, or ability to understand how this occurred.
On October 17, Virgil van Dijk suffered a torn knee ligament during the opening minutes of the Merseyside classic. Less than four weeks later, on November 11, his regular teammate on defense, Joe Gomez, injured a tendon while making international commitments to England. And that, to a large extent, was enough. Liverpool’s aspirations, at that time, had to be tempered.
Football has a discouraging tendency to despise extenuating circumstances – an explanation is often seen as synonymous with an excuse, according to the sports lexicon, as Roy Keane, the tough former Manchester United captain, summed it up precisely. after Liverpool’s humiliation against Manchester City on Sunday. “They have been lousy champions,” Keane said. Being a “big club”, he explained, means being able to face any of the setbacks that you encounter along the way.
There is some truth to that, but it carries with it an air of lighthearted and brutal simplification. Of course, Liverpool cannot deny blame for their title defense collapse. The club decided not to add a central defender to the squad last summer and instead recruited a reserve left-back who made his first and only Premier League appearance in the closing minutes on Sunday. That already seemed like a risk then, even without the benefit of hindsight.
At the same time, Jürgen Klopp, the club’s coach, has been gaining prominence as the season progresses. However, he must also bear part of the responsibility. Klopp has relied too heavily on a handful of players instead of spreading the load more evenly. Even he has admitted that his squad is as mentally and physically exhausted as it appears.
One determining factor is that Klopp has been managing a team that has become predictable and works with difficulty, dependent on the methods by which they won the Champions League in 2019 and the Premier League last year, even when the pressure Liverpool’s energetic and high intensity has been toned down and the grip of its attacking defenses has been numbed.
While Liverpool’s opponents have learned – in recent weeks, both Burnley and Brighton have won at Anfield, stopping the champion in his tracks using basically the same tactics – Klopp’s team has not; his coach seems to insist on doing the same things over and over again in the hopeless illusion that the outcome will be different next time.
There is a useful contrast here, between the most recent conqueror and his heir apparent. The destinies of Liverpool and Manchester City have been so intertwined in the last three years that now it is possible to be tempted to see them as something that is inextricably linked, so the success of one is taken as a denunciation of the failure of the other. .
This season only seems to reinforce the parallelism. The problems Liverpool have had this year do not exactly coincide with those Manchester City faced last year: then City were volatile, scoring large amounts of goals, but there were weeks when they froze completely; Instead, Liverpool’s failure has been a slow-motion decline that began even before the title was won, a team that eroded through the fall and came to a standstill at Christmas.
But at first glance, the cause and effect are the same: the lack of defensive cover, the oxygen debt that must be paid after spending two seasons at the top, the feeling of hitting a wall; All of the above combined as Manchester City ran rampant at Anfield on Sunday, and so luck turned irrevocably towards Pep Guardiola’s side.
There is also a simple explanation for that. Last summer, Guardiola and his employers realized that the team needed more toughness. Manchester City lost nine games last season and their efforts to win a third title in a row were unraveled not only by Liverpool’s relentlessness, but by their own crystal jaw.
So while much of European football was concerned about the economic impact of the coronavirus and the subsequent shutdown, Manchester City went to spend $ 140 million on two defenders: Ruben Dias and Nathan Aké. And that, in the long run, was enough. In the months that followed, Dias has emerged as the cornerstone on which Guardiola has built a new, parsimonious and indomitable version of Manchester City, one that is now poised to claim the championship.
However, in this case the simple explanation is not enough. Guardiola has not limited himself to putting a new central defender on his team and putting pressure on the game. Instead, he readjusted his strategy. His team has been a bit less expansive and a bit more controlled, anchored in a more conservative midfield. Guardiola has made this change in a period of a few months, after a summer in which he had no preseason, during a campaign in which there is hardly time to train.
Guardiola has hinted that he took that risk – and it was ultimately a risk – in part to adjust to the realities of this more congested season. But also partly driven by the same drive that led him to recruit Dias and Aké: the awareness that Manchester City needed to evolve once again if they wanted to outwit opponents who already knew what to expect from their team.
