It all began with Divock Origi, on a balmy Friday evening at a packed Anfield. He danced down the left wing, squeezed in a cross, Grant Hanley sliced the ball into his own net, and we were away. As Liverpool’s players celebrated, their fans spilled out into the aisles, filling the night with song. Meanwhile, as Norwich regrouped, their fans in the Anfield Road end roared them on, demanding a reaction. It was early August, the 2019-20 Premier League season was six minutes old and the months ahead heaved with sheer possibility.
Every new season begins like this, with fresh promise and fresh faces and fresh grass and fresh hope. New kits are launched, new players unveiled. Predictions are made and swiftly shredded. Yet has there ever been a season of English football that has so violently confounded the expectations vested in it? At the end of a campaign that in its attritional length, toxic temper and human toll has occasionally felt more like war than sport, the dominant sensation is one not of relief, but exhaustion.
The first forced cessation since 1939-40 was simply the most significant of this season’s many befuddlements. The sense of pervasive strangeness set in long before Covid-19 and has persisted long after the expedited restart. It has been the season of fake crowd noise and Stockley Park and electronic lines being drawn from armpits, of Sheffield United’s flying centre-backs and Watford sacking three managers and Southampton still having quite a good season despite losing 9-0.
Still, at least there’s been plenty to talk about. In a sense this is the entire point of the exercise, the reason the Premier League was so desperate to emerge from its plague hibernation. It wasn’t just the spectre of financial ruination, but the sense the Premier League is not simply a sporting competition but a rolling news source, an endless conversation, a 12-month soap opera. As it turned out, the restart has panned out with no major catastrophes, a logistical triumph for which the league as well as the individual clubs and their staff have to take credit.
As for the quality of the product itself, that depends very much on your perspective. The lack of stadium atmosphere has been alienating but weirdly enlightening, allowing us to glimpse these distant athletes in their unadulterated natural habitat. Hearing Newcastle’s Matt Ritchie scream: “How have you given that, you wee dick?” at a defenceless assistant referee is the sort of content we never knew we needed in our lives.
There’s been a lot of talk about asterisks, largely from rival fans seeking to attach some sort of caveat to Liverpool’s first league title in 30 years. Perhaps it stems from this sense of disconnect between the warm and familiar world in which Liverpool rampantly embarked on their title charge, and the cold, distanced dystopia in which they have completed it. Not better, or worse. Just noticeably, bewilderingly different.
What Liverpool’s title teaches us above all is the importance of having a plan. An identity, an idea, something around which an entire club can unite. Something that sustains you when times get tough. Most of Liverpool’s opponents may have known exactly what was coming, but that didn’t make it any easier to stop. From the brilliant full backs to the relentless front three to the oozing authority of Virgil van Dijk, through that metronomic midfield, Liverpool played like a team who knew exactly who they were. Who weren’t expecting to win every battle, but would come at you regardless.
Manchester City, too, will come again and the return of Aymeric Laporte since lockdown has underlined what they were missing for much of the season: a dominant presence at the back to match Van Dijk or Vincent Kompany in seasons past.
Lower down the financial ladder, we learned again that a smaller club with a plan and a clear sense of purpose will often defeat a richer club without either. This was how Brendan Rodgers’s Leicester managed to surpass all expectations in the first half of the season, how the irrepressible Wolves managed to juggle an exhausting Europa League campaign to challenge for Europe again, how Chris Wilder’s wonderful Sheffield United proved English managers can innovate with the best of them.
Of the big clubs, Tottenham have arguably overperformed of late, José Mourinho cautiously resurrecting a campaign that looked sunk beyond repair in January. Arsenal have grounds for optimism despite plummeting to their lowest position since the pre-Wenger era. Carlo Ancelotti saved Everton from relegation, even if he has yet to unveil anything resembling a blueprint. Chelsea and Manchester United have somehow managed to recast themselves as plucky insurgents, cavalier sides with a slightly soft underbelly, and for all the strides Frank Lampard and Ole Gunnar Solskjær have made, fourth place would still flatter them both.
At the bottom, continuity and churn have received their comeuppance. Watford’s determination to sack their way to safety looks to have come unstuck at the very last. Meanwhile, Southampton, Newcastle, Crystal Palace and (possibly) Aston Villa have reaped the rewards for backing their men through tough times. But then Norwich largely kept faith with the team that won them promotion, and are going straight back down, probably joined by Bournemouth: a team hampered by shocking recruitment and a more general sensation of rust and decay.
Perhaps this is the fate that awaits all survival projects in the end sooner or later: the sheer impossibility of nailing every single decision in a division that ruthlessly punishes errors. A couple of wrong turns and it could quite easily be Burnley or Brighton or West Ham vanishing without trace next season. For the big clubs, the margins are fat and generous. For the smaller ones, cruelly fine.
The stretching out of the league is evident in that 95 points is no longer enough for a title, while 35 is probably enough for safety.
The real story of the season is how many of the happy delusions that have underpinned the Premier League over the past few years - that the playing field is fair, that anybody can win the title, that the Premier League stands for more than revenue generation, that racism is a problem consigned to the past - have been irrevocably unpicked. Until recently, you could probably make a cogent argument for all of them. Maybe this year was when the mask finally slipped.
In a way, it all ended with Origi too, on a muggy Wednesday evening at a deserted Anfield: the last man on the pitch after Liverpool’s trophy celebrations, a winner’s medal around his neck, staring into an empty Kop. It was late July, 348 days since he had set up the first goal of the title-winning season on August 9th. Liverpool’s dreams had come true. Norwich’s had long since turned to dust. Up in the stands, stadium staff in masks patrolled the empty gangways. At the end of the longest and strangest season of them all it was fitting that Origi’s hair is now white. – Guardian
