Premier League Preview: Are Liverpool Serious Contenders?
As Tuesday’s transfer deadline day looms over a horizon made up entirely of banknotes, and football edges ever closer to eating itself, it seems almost antiquated to talk of the weekend’s matches. As if they matter.
It can surely only be a matter of time before actual games are rendered obsolete, with the Premier League table instead decided on net spend rather than points accumulated.
To listen to the parlance of so many football fans these days is to seemingly eavesdrop on an accountant networking event, with the raging debate concerning not whether a given player would improve a team, but whether they represent "value."
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“No way is he worth £22 million, I’d say £19 million tops,” said no one interestingly, ever. When did we become so dull as a species?
Forget football as a vehicle of escapism, bypass going to the match altogether, and instead pull up a pew to pore over spreadsheets and chew the fat on the respective merits of your side’s expenditure.
Football at this juncture in the season could not be more pantomime. If my sources are correct, Tuesday will see comedian Ken Dodd parachute from a helicopter onto the roof of Sky Sports News HQ before hosting the final segment of the show with reporter Natalie Sawyer, wearing nothing but a yellow tie. Sky Sports' Dharmesh Sheth will borrow Dodd's feather duster to work the touchscreen.
The fixtures spat out by the Premier League for the weekend certainly lend themselves to the odd moment of (transfer) navel-gazing.
Heavyweight bouts are conspicuous by absence—only Swansea City’s hosting of Manchester United sees any of last season’s top eight go head-to-head (eighth place v fourth place)—but it is in these quieter moments that managers can learn a great deal about their players and, whisper it quietly, hatch and hone transfer plans.
Liverpool v West Ham—Saturday at 3 p.m. BST
As one of the Premier League’s more verbose managers, Brendan Rodgers seems perpetually on the verge of saying something that will be made into a Vine before he’s completed his sentence.
There was at least a hint of The Office's David Brent about his pre-match proclamation on Monday Night Football that key to Liverpool's success at Arsenal would be to “dominate space and not possession,” as per Joe.co.uk. Thierry Henry shared a surreptitious look with Gary Neville that recalled Tim glancing over at Dawn on reception. In turn, Neville burst into hysterical laughter.
Off camera, Brendan went to see if his tactics board had been set in jelly.
How close Rodgers was to following his coaching team Colin Pascoe and Mike Marsh out of the Anfield exit door over the summer is open to conjecture, but what cannot be disputed is that Liverpool look a different proposition to the one that so meekly limped to sixth place last term.
A post-Luis Suarez negative swing of 22 points from the previous campaign needed addressing urgently, and while three games in is no time to gauge whether surgery on his squad has been a success, the early signs are promising.
Successive 1-0 victories over Stoke City and Bournemouth received little fanfare, other than the acknowledgement that a win at the Britannia Stadium at least exorcised the ghosts of last season's 6-1 reverse. And yet, while both opponents would argue they themselves were worth at least a point, that Liverpool won ugly in a period of transition is a feather, albeit not of the peacock variety, in their collective cap.
On Monday night at the Emirates, everything was stepped up at least a couple of levels. For 45 minutes Liverpool played with a muscular energy that left those watching as breathless as an Arsenal side that would have been battered into submission by half-time, were it not for Petr Cech putting in a performance as heroic as his debut against West Ham United was hapless.
Any Premier League side would struggle without their first-choice centre-half partnership, but even given Per Mertesacker and Laurent Koscielny's absences, it was a remarkable physical performance from Christian Benteke. Pitting Calum Chambers against him was like putting Woody Allen in a boxing ring with Muhammad Ali.
The Belgian won a headache-inducing 16 aerial duels, 12 more than Olivier Giroud performing a similar role for Arsenal, as per WhoScored.com. No player has managed more in a single game over the past two seasons.
Fears that Benteke's arrival would precipitate a more direct style, and that new coach Sean O'Driscoll is in fact Charles Hughes dressed in a Scooby-Doo disguise, have also proved to be unfounded. Only Arsenal, quelle surprise, have played fewer long balls (50 to Liverpool's 52) this season to date. Liverpool have hardly bombed the box with crosses either, averaging the fewest per game (12, Arsenal surprisingly average the most with 27) of any top-flight side.
Barney Ronay's typically erudite column in the Guardian describes the current Liverpool side as "pure, uncut essence of Brendan, a team no longer bound up with leftovers from someone else’s grand plan," later pointing out that Rodgers has overseen "four significantly different teams in four seasons at the club."
There's certainly more than an element of truth about the first statement, with really only Martin Skrtel and Lucas Leiva still kicking around from when he walked through the Shankly Gates in 2012, espousing his principles and philosophies to all who'd listen with the relish of a religious zealot.
Those left have all presumably bought into his methods. Much has been made of Steven Gerrard's departure, but in truth, pushing sentimentality aside, Rodgers picked his captain last season with the obligatory tone one usually reserves for visiting elderly relatives.
Losing your best players can't be too much fun for a manager either, but even the departures of Suarez and Raheem Sterling in successive summers has only helped clarify Rodgers' vision, at the very least in his mind. There can only be so many times you can watch your talisman flash his knickers at the prettier girl across the street before you accept that when the fire stops burning, it's time to cut your losses.
Rodgers' decision to nail his colours to Dejan Lovren's mast, at the expense of the infinitely more popular Mamadou Sakho, has also, for the minute at least, proved an astute call. Three clean sheets in as many matches, from a back four that last term was more porous than a colander made of paper, is not to be sniffed at. As for Joe Gomez, just imagine how good he'll look when he won't have to run with Mesut Ozil tucked in his pocket.
If Liverpool's new £60 million forward line can add goals to early promise—and both Benteke and Roberto Firmino will be confident against a West Ham side that shipped four against Bournemouth at home last weekend—then Rodgers will be able to smugly reflect on an opening month to the season that, had it gone differently, could have been his last at Anfield.
Chelsea v Crystal Palace—Saturday at 3 p.m. BST
While Liverpool's back four has gone from being more charitable than the lovechild of philanthropist Bob Geldof and comedian Lenny Henry to being so tight it owes itself a fiver, Chelsea's back line has been nothing short of a shambles.
As per WhoScored.com, Chelsea have conceded more shots per game than all but three Premier League clubs (Sunderland, Newcastle United and West Bromwich Albion). Not to mention the more old-school method of identifying defensive frailties: seven goals conceded in three matches, which is an average of 2.3 goals per game as opposed to a 0.84 average over the whole of last season.
Jose Mourinho put on his best pouty Joan Collins face to decry John Terry's dismissal at West Brom, but in each of Chelsea's games to date, the club captain has worn the haunted look of someone who is starting to realise time waits for no man, especially 34-year-old centre-halves.
Given Terry was arguably the Premier League's best defender last season, though, it would be premature to write him off just yet. Gary Neville wrote an interesting column for the Telegraph recently, about how Premier League clubs discard older players too soon, arguing: "Terry should be at Chelsea until he is 36, 37 years of age. He might play only 20 games a season but they will be 20 very important ones."
Still, in quieter moments, Terry may reflect that an afternoon in the stands rather than chasing a Crystal Palace side that contains one of the quickest counter-attacking armouries in the league may be the proverbial blessing in disguise. If Branislav Ivanovic hasn't woken up in cold sweats all week at the prospect of facing Yannick Bolasie (available again after returning from compassionate leave), Jason Puncheon, Wilfried Zaha and Bakary Sako, then he really is football's hardest man.
Swansea City v Manchester United—Sunday at 4 p.m. BST
The rhetoric coming out of Old Trafford on the back of Thursday's Champions League draw in Monaco will invariably be of the "there are no easy games" variety, but a group that pitches them with PSV Eindhoven, Wolfsburg and CSKA Moscow will be quite the fillip on their return to Europe's top competition.
It's been a good week for United on their foreign sojourns, with Wednesday's 4-0 defeat of Club Brugge just what Louis van Gaal needed on the back of a goalless draw at home to Newcastle. The Dutchman's indomitable faith in his methods has convinced many, but an obsession with possession and seeming indifference to goals is starting to jar with more than a few of the club's supporters.
Wayne Rooney is back on form/still garbage depending on personal taste, with his hat-trick against Brugge testimony to the fact/completely irrelevant. Delete where applicable.
The player himself, as per Jamie Jackson of the Guardian, insists he never doubted the goals would return: "People make a big thing of it. I understand. I have understood since a young age because of my name, because of who I am it will get publicised a lot more. That is a part of my job. I have to accept that.”
An away day in Swansea will almost certainly prove tougher than United's bonus in Belgium. Last season Garry Monk took six points off Van Gaal, and like their visitors on Sunday, Swansea have also enjoyed an unbeaten start to the league campaign. While United have stuttered and stalled to seven points from nine, Swansea have been typically fluid in collecting five of their own.
There's been much to admire about a style of football that now seems less about possession for possession's sake, and more about creating chances for electric front pair Bafetimbi Gomis and Andre Ayew. It'll be intriguing to see whether Jonjo Shelvey can maintain majestic early-season form in the exalted company of Bastian Schweinsteiger and Co., with Roy Hodgson likely to be more interested than most.
Van Gaal will almost certainly have noted how, via WhoScored.com, Swansea (56.6 percent) are one of only two teams, Arsenal (59.5 percent) being the other, to have enjoyed more possession than his United side (55.8 percent) this season.
He could probably live with defeat at the Liberty Stadium, but if a usurpation hasn't taken place in the possession table come Sunday evening, it's going to be the world's longest trip back to Manchester for United's players.
