Having to void the Premier League season would rob Liverpool of an honour already more than earned
If the decision is reluctantly made to void the Premier League season, it would deny one of the finest teams in the competition’s history a rightful moment of recognition.
Liverpool
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Not the first time, it was Jurgen Klopp who perhaps articulated it best.
When asked to consider the impact of suspending the Premier League to help combat the coronavirus pandemic, the German cut to the heart of it with a surgeon’s precision.
Football, he said, was “the most important of the least important things”; it doesn’t matter right now, but it did and will again. Hopefully soon.
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As lives are lost, and livelihoods threatened, considering the outcome of mere games, and the consequence of their absence, can seem inappropriate.
And yet in the terrifying, unfamiliar and rapidly changing circumstances we find ourselves, it is perhaps understandable, valuable even, to cling - for a moment’s release if nothing else - to those things that just weeks ago felt critical to the rhythm and structure of many of our lives.
To care about two things at the same time is not to equate their value. And the gravity of this crisis does not simply invalidate all that happened immediately before it.
Or could it?
MOVING TARGETS
Earlier this week UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin suggested that should European football fail to restart before July, “the season will probably be lost”.
The same man put his signature to a letter on Thursday expressing confidence that football can restart in the next few months “with conditions that will be dictated by public authorities”.
Adding that “any decision of abandoning domestic competitions is, at this stage, premature and not justified.”
No one can say with anything approaching certainty what comes next.
Belgium this week became the first country to abandon hopes of a restart, declaring current leaders Club Brugge champions (though only one game short of the end of season play offs, which have simply been cancelled).
In the Premier League - and elsewhere in Europe - no so such clean fix presents itself.
Voiding the season would see relegations unjustly avoided; likely European qualifications lost; successes penalised and failures rewarded with monumental and far reaching financial implications; personal records and achievements potentially wiped; and hundreds of messy legal challenges launched.
CHAMPIONS ELECT
In purely sporting terms Liverpool have more to lose than most.
When play was suspended they held a 25 point lead. If the season can be rebooted in any form they will be champions. No ifs, no maybes.
And not just any champions. A case was being mounted to be considered one of the greatest ever. They were having a season unlike any other before the great hiatus.
Victory over West Ham at the end of February stretched an unbeaten record in the league to 38 matches. Across that period they amassed more points than Manchester United and Arsenal combined.
Taking 79 points from the first 27 matches obliterated the best records in any of Europe’s top five leagues, ever.
It has been a season in which individuals, as well as the collective, have enhanced their claims to greatness, too.
Mo Salah scored his 70th goal in 100 Premier League appearances, more than Ruud van Nistelrooy, Sergio Aguero, Thierry Henry and Luis Surez, second on the list only to Alan Shearer.
The twin marauding full-backs Trent Alexander-Arnold and Andy Robertson are the standard bearers for a tactical phenomena that will define the age when this period is looked back on in the future.
In a team decorated by the attacking menace of Sadio Mane, Roberto Firmino and Salah, the work of Alisson and Virgil van Dijk at the other end of the pitch has been immense, and just as central to how the side operates.
There are simply no weak links.
THE ONE THEY WANT MOST
A careless defeat to Watford and a loss in the Champions League to Atletico Madrid may have denied Liverpool the chance of matching Arsenal’s ‘Invincibles’ record and that of Manchester United’s treble winners.
But the notion that such losses devalue the campaign somehow are the currency purely of mischief making rivals, rather than serious assessment. The title is how truly great teams are measured.
Especially for a club whose relationship with that honour has shifted so markedly across the last three decades.
In the pre-Premier League era winning the league was part of Liverpool’s identity, in the last 30 years the very act of not winning it has defined them in large part, despite notable continental successes.
That divorce has been painful. Especially after it was Sir Alex Ferguson’s United that first ‘knocked them off their perch’.
The success of their football team was always central to the city’s sense of pride, too, in a period in which social and economic changes saw it neglected, or even actively marginalised, by other parts of the country.
To be denied a moment confirming their return to the summit of the game, a return to the perch in the most emphatic of fashions - even if that decision is arrived at to answer a national and global emergency - would be a hard reality to face for those who have been yearning for it so badly all these years.
THE SHOW WILL GO ON?
It may not come to that, of course.
Moves are still afoot to see the season played out. A conclusion arrived at on the sporting field rather in boardrooms or, worse still, courtrooms.
A camp for players to convene at and play matches in one location behind closed doors for TV screens only has been floated. Other solutions will be proposed and considered in the coming weeks.
Unlike sporting codes in Australia, European football has deep pockets to ride this out for longer. But not forever. A decision will eventually be forced.
Postponing Euro 2020 has cost UEFA hundreds of millions of dollars, and the lost revenue for failing to complete this Premier League season is estimated to be something close to $1.5 billion.
That fact rather than romance, ultimately, may prove the decisive driver in the ambition to complete the season, in whatever form is possible.
Originally published as Having to void the Premier League season would rob Liverpool of an honour already more than earned