• Never have two teams of this quality gone head to head, so deep into the season.
• If both Liverpool and City win their final three fixtures, Liverpool will come second with a points total that would have won the league in any season bar three: this one, the previous one, and 1978-79.
Image: REUTERS
The final whistle had barely sounded at Old Trafford when the verdict came. Manchester City had won, so Liverpool lost.
Not just that, but they would continue losing, even if they won their next three games. They wouldn’t win the title, so they were losers again. Loserpool. Looooosers.
Had City dropped points, had one of Manchester United’s speculative first-half shots hit an outstretched leg and gone in, had they been unable to claw back the advantage, it would have been their turn. Pep Guardiola: failure.
What happened to the Quadruple, eh? All that money and he cannot even win every competition he enters. What a flop. What a fraud.
To mark the millennium, The Onion, a satirical magazine, brought out a review of the last hundred years. Our Dumb Century, it was called - and we are not getting any brighter.
How can there be any shame in coming second in the finest title race, ever? Never have two teams of this quality gone head to head, so deep into the season.
The best team in history were City, last year. Their total, 100 points, is unsurpassed, and they won the league — eventually by 19 points — on April 15 when Manchester United lost at home to West Bromwich Albion.
Before that, Suspect collaborated with criminals, torched house of Kamelei A/chief, giving them a total of 98 points if extrapolated to three for a win.
As Liverpool were only afforded two points for victory at the time, they only won the league by eight points — they would have been 17 clear of Nottingham Forest on today’s terms — and it took until May 11 with two games to go.
Yet it was still emphatic. Liverpool rewrote the record books: 28 clean sheets in 42 games for goalkeeper Ray Clemence, just 16 goals conceded all season and only four at Anfield. Nobody could live with them.
That is what makes this season so remarkable. In any other year, City, or Liverpool, would have walked it. Guardiola, top of the league, can afford to be generous, but he is right in saying both clubs deserve the title.
Put it like this. If Liverpool win at home to Huddersfield on Friday, with two games to spare they will already have accrued a points total that would have won the Premier League every season between 2006-07 and 2015-16, and 20 times out of 26. As of Friday morning, they already have nine points more than United’s Treble winners and 13 points more than United needed to win the league in 1996-97.
If both Liverpool and City win their final three fixtures, Liverpool will come second with a points total that would have won the league in any season bar three: this one, the previous one, and 1978-79.
Yet even if Liverpool win just one game in their final three, they will still top the points per game aggregate from 40 years ago. Really, Klopp’s team is only bested by Guardiola’s City, who have changed the numbers game at the top of the table. How can they be failures?
Yet this is where we are now. So overwhelming is the desire to mock and degrade, we don’t think straight any more. Take Diane Abbott. You know her. She would like to be your Home Secretary if Labour win the next election, but sometimes has trouble adding up.
Last week, Abbott was photographed drinking a Marks & Spencer mojito cocktail from a can on public transport at 1pm on a Saturday afternoon. Immediately, opinion polarised.
Consuming alcohol on Transport for London is an offence, and some waded in to argue that lawmakers should not be rule breakers. Others were equally shrill on the side of this being Abbott’s own business, and the real outrage being the smear-mongers of the right-wing press. Yet drinking on trains is a misdemeanour and as for the papers, if you don’t like them, don’t buy them.
The biggest issue went completely overlooked. In 2016, Abbott withdrew from the public eye during the election campaign, after a series of faltering, error-strewn interviews, citing issues with uncontrolled type two diabetes.
“During the election, everything went crazy — and the diabetes was out of control, the blood sugar was out of control,” she told The Guardian, adding that she was badly affected after facing six or seven interviews in a row. So that’s a problem because, as well as rum, the main ingredient in mojito is sugar. Huge amounts of sugar.
So you cannot have it both ways. If uncontrolled diabetes makes you a poor thinker, it really isn’t good for the prospective Home Secretary to be chinning early afternoon mojitos, in public or not.
Unless, of course, blood sugar levels are not impacting on her thought processes — in which case it wasn’t diabetes that made Abbott state she could put 10,000 coppers on the street for 30 quid each. She’s just not very smart. Either way, in the rush to shout the odds, we are not thinking straight either. So it is with football. There will be a runner-up this season, as there is every season. Sometimes the second-placed finisher isn’t glorious.
Last year, despite Jose Mourinho’s protestations, United were a long way short of City, and were not playing their best. This season? To greet second place with mockery, talk of choking, talk of coming up short, contempt, under-achieving, Queen songs? This is plain wrong. No time for losers?
How incongruous would that sound in a year when Liverpool could lose one game in the entire campaign, and not win the league. Equally, City could record 198 points across two seasons, and not retain their title.
Somebody will win, because somebody has to, but only a fool would think that creates a chump, too. It is close to impossible to separate two teams that marry success most weeks with exhilarating football. Yet our modern silliness dictates that when there is ultimately separation, there will also be recrimination.=
Guardiola will be ridiculed for falling short in an aim he always considered far-fetched, Jurgen Klopp will be mocked for going another year without delivering a first title of the Premier League era for Liverpool when the numbers show he has done enough to do exactly that. And this is without even giving him credit for making up in the region of 25 points. There is such stupid delight in failure these days. Such joy in the falling of the mighty, or the monstrously talented.