Why You Should Accept Liverpool Are in a Title Race & Enjoy it Whilst You Can | OneFootball

With the win over Aston Villa on Saturday night, following in the immediate wake of Manchester City’s loss to Brighton & Hove Albion, Liverpool moved five points clear of the side that are currently under investigation for as many as 130 charges of financial impropriety.

When the Gunners could only manage a draw with Chelsea at Stamford Bridge, that meant that the Reds were also nine points clear of Arsenal. Nothing is ever guaranteed in football and you won’t find anyone at Anfield suggesting that the title is all but in the bag, but we all need to embrace that we’re in a title race, even if we don’t end up winning it.

You Never Know What Might Happen

During the 2019-2020 campaign, Liverpool started like a house on fire. Other than a frustrating draw with Manchester United at Old Trafford, a place we’ve always struggled to perform at, the Reds were imperious. They went on to win 26 of the first 27 matches, which is a performance the likes of which the top-flight hadn’t seen before and is unlikely to see again.

Because of so many years of hurt in the Premier League, however, a huge swathe of supporters refused to get carried away. People barely felt as though they could enjoy it, terrified that in doing so they might somehow contrive to ruin it all and cause the season to fall apart.

You can say ‘touch wood’ all you want, squeeze into your lucky underpants at every opportunity and refuse to acknowledge that the Reds are in a title race ‘just in case’, but as someone desperate to win the lottery, I can tell you that none of us have that sort of power over the world. If Liverpool don’t win the title this season, it won’t be because you decided to enjoy the possibility that they might.

We all spent 2019-2020 terrified that we might jinx it, only for the Reds to win the title but for it to happen behind closed doors so we didn’t get to enjoy it anyway.  I know I didn’t sleep well that year because of the stress of covid but also the stress of the season being potentially cancelled and taking away our first Premier League win.  The good thing this year is it all feels like a freebie, which means I can sleep well in my new Simba bed and enjoy watching the reds with less expectation.  Luckily I bought one of those ottomans so if things do close at the end I can hide underneath the bed too. You never know what will happen, so enjoy things whilst you can.

It Could be a Brilliant Season

Right now, Liverpool sit top of the Premier League and top of the new-look Champions League, as well as being in the quarter-finals of the League Cup. It is entirely possible that we don’t win any of those competitions, given how difficult it is to lift silverware in the modern era. Yet it is also possible that we win all three of them, with the Reds having won more than a few trebles in years gone by.

This is a football team that is to be enjoyed at every possible opportunity, filled as it is with brilliant lads who deserve to be loved. Darwin Núñez might not be your favourite ever player, but why not enjoy the madness instead of constantly sniping?

I personally believe that the contracts of the ‘Big Three’ will get sorted in due course, but maybe they won’t. Perhaps it is possible that they will all leave Anfield at the end of the season, riding off into the sunset of life at another football club. If that were to happen, what a shame it would be that in their final campaign with the Reds you didn’t enjoy every second of them, singing and dancing and loving what you were watching, all because you were terrified of jinxing something that you had no control over in the first place.

This is a season that has all the hallmarks of being a classic, so you should enjoy every single second of it.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

There is an attitude from some that we’re ‘only in November’, yet with 11 games played we’re more than a quarter of the way through the season. Yes, there are still a huge amount of games to be played and any number of twists and turns that we’re likely to experience, but acting as though Liverpool are five points clear at the top is completely irrelevant is just a little bit silly.

Only five other teams have been five points clear or more after 11 games, including us in 2019-2020, with all five going on to win the title. That doesn’t mean that it is in the bag, but playing down what Arne Slot and his players have achieved would be daft.

According to UnderStat, Liverpool’s Expected Goals in the Premier League sit at 24.67 so far this season. The xG Against, meanwhile, sits at 10.85. In reality, the Reds have scored 21 goals and conceded 6, so it isn’t as if we are dramatically over-performing or underperforming on either metric. What that means is that what we’re doing is entirely sustainable and there is unlikely to be a crash down in either direction in order to allow the xG and xGA to ‘level out’.

These are stats that tell a story about what Slot and his team are achieving and why the feeling in the Liverpool camp will be that it’s sustainable. Enjoy it, then, in case you can’t in the future.