So, where were we? Ah, that’s right. An all-conquering Liverpool were just about to wrap up the Premier League title, with every chance of exceeding 100 points and so setting a record.
The memories flood back. The commanding figure of Virgil van Dijk at the back. The focused energy in midfield. The full-backs tearing up the wings at every opportunity. That lightning fast and deadly front three, so artfully put together with the pace and threat coming from wide as Roberto Firmino drops off to create space. Remorseless winners who … lost four of their last six games (including three in cups) before the shutdown.
One of the odder aspects of the 100-day break was feeling context slipping away. All those shifts of momentum, the tiny details you sense when you are immersed in football and on which, for better or worse, we place great store, seem – even within the parameters of a game whose essential lack of importance has been emphatically underlined in the past three months – oddly trivial. Shutdown has acted as a great reset button. The vast majority of injuries have cleared up. Everybody is fresh, if not match-fit.
In a sense there are no excuses any more. There is a weird purity to the next month and a half of football, as though it’s being played in lab conditions. This is football’s Dogme 95 moment, a return amid the oddity to a focus on the game itself, stripped of external factors and distractions. Perhaps that will benefit what Jamie Carragher calls the Monday-to-Friday players, those whose brilliance is obvious in training but who struggle to perform to that level in front of a live audience.
Yet there is an oddity here, a paradox similar to that exposed by the Danish film directors Lars von Trier’s and Thomas Vinterberg’s “Vows of Chastity”. That, for all their concern about the excessive use of special effects and the way audiences were emotionally led by background music, their hyper-naturalism was itself jarring. So jarring, in fact, that Von Trier himself ended up using background music in his first Dogme film, Idioterne (The Idiots).
The oft-expressed idea that “football without fans is nothing” is a self-serving cliche; football predated fans and went on without fans on a regular basis in parks and schoolyards across the country. But football without fans is odd, and it can have taken only a few minutes of watching Borussia Dortmund against Schalke on that first afternoon of the Bundesliga’s resumption to realise that, however intriguing the noise of ball on boot was, however pleasing the rattle of the net support was when a goal was scored, this was not a return to some prelapsarian idyll.
Fans can bring pressure, and they also bring support. What has become clear during Jürgen Klopp’s four and a half years at Liverpool is how significant the ability to energise a fanbase can still be. It is easy to assume that in the days of all-seat stadiums, corporatisation and mass football tourism that the crowd has become more passive, that it does not play the role it did in, say, Bill Shankly’s time. But the 4-0 victory over Barcelona last season gives the lie to that. Fans may have become customers, rough edges face-painted to an ad-man’s dream, but they are not mere spectators, not yet.
Liverpool have not lost a home league game since Crystal Palace beat them in April 2017. The extent to which the Anfield crowd has sustained them through that remarkable three-year run may become apparent over the next six weeks. For Liverpool, this compressed belated run-in is stranger than for most.
Even the most pessimistic of Liverpool fans, even the most determined not to tempt fate, must have let themselves imagine in the early weeks of this year how their 30-year title drought would come to an end. Whether they envisaged a symbolically satisfying success at the Etihad, or a rapturous night at Anfield, they will not have dreamed of empty stands, Jordan Henderson leading the squad in applauding a space where the fans should have been. And that, inevitably, will feel anticlimactic.
But the weird finale should not be allowed to diminish their achievement. This may not be the procession it seemed the final quarter of the season would be for Liverpool, but it is no less a triumph for that. Their football this season has been astonishing, their relentlessness extraordinary, particularly given City’s excellence in the previous two campaigns.
Whether they go on to break the record of 100 points set by Manchester City in 2017-18 is almost incidental. Their superiority this season has been clear – and they should set a record for the earliest title win by games remaining (while simultaneously being the latest title winners by date); the record stands at five: Manchester United in 2000-01 and City in that 2017-18 campaign.
All that remains, then, is to go on accumulating points. Liverpool could conceivably rack up 109, but quite how motivated they are by a number, particularly with no fans to create a euphoric mood, is impossible to say. Perhaps the shutdown will help them in that regard. It may be that the little wobble, the four defeats in six across all competitions, at the end of February and the beginning of March, was the result of fatigue and that Liverpool will return refreshed.
But then there is also a theory that Liverpool are a better side when in rhythm. Their first-team squad had a 14-day break between a 4-0 win over Southampton and the scratchy 1-0 win at Norwich that immediately preceded that run of six games. Liverpool arguably haven’t been at their absolute best, in fact, since demolishing Leicester 4-0 on Boxing Day, even if they did win 10 and draw one of their following 11 games.
All of which is really to say that we have no idea how Liverpool, or anybody, will respond to the 100-day lay-off. But the circumstances of the break and the empty stands certainly don’t invalidate whatever achievements they end up with this season; arguably they have made things harder.
Winning titles is about overcoming whatever challenges occur. Liverpool almost had the league wrapped up overcoming the usual hurdles; a series of far more unusual ones remains.