Originally posted by Mr Pink
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I am and I'm sure everyone else is
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We have enough of those in the CL, Super Cup and World Club Cup so I think we are coveredOriginally posted by Mr Pink View Post
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Originally posted by Assassin View PostI am and I'm sure everyone else is
Good man, maybe read the next sentence...I don't tipComment
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Villa at home is easter weekend so would be a nice time to win it. 4 day weekend.
Due to Hillsborough anniversary on Wednesday after if we are still in CL it would be played Tuesday ruling out moving the game to the league to Sunday.Comment
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It had been coming for months. Tongues had been bitten, powerful urges suppressed. Finally, at 6.19pm on Sunday evening, after Alisson released Mohamed Salah to secure victory over Manchester United, Anfield exploded into euphoria. Liverpool’s supporters could resist no longer.
“And now you’re gonna believe us,” they chanted. “We’re gonna win the league.”
It wasn’t based on a calculation – that Liverpool were now 16 points clear of Manchester City, having played a game fewer, and their Premier League title-winning chances are now rated above 99 per cent by various predictive models. It was a release of tension, an outpouring of joy. “We’re gonna win the league.”
The statistics back up those supporters’ optimism. Liverpool have won 21 and drawn one of their first 22 Premier League games, the best start in top-flight history in England. They have gone 39 Premier League matches unbeaten since losing to Manchester City on January 3 last year. Since March 10 they have taken 91 points out of a possible 93. Since drawing with Leicester 12 months ago, they have won 19 consecutive home games in the Premier League, one short of Manchester City’s record. They have not lost in the Premier League at Anfield since April 2017.
Jurgen Klopp smiled afterwards when it was put to him that this was the first time all season that Liverpool’s supporters had dared to declare – so publicly, so rapturously – that their 30-year wait was nearly over. “I’m not here to dictate what they sing,” the Liverpool manager said. “If our fans were not in a good mood now, that would be really strange. Of course they’re allowed to dream, to sing whatever they want. We will not be part of that party yet but it’s no problem.”
He might have chosen to put it a different way: that “we decide when it’s over”. Remember that phrase? Possibly not. But Klopp does. It constitutes one of several significant moments in the restoration of the crumbling fortress he walked into just over four years ago.
November 8, 2015: Liverpool 1 Crystal Palace 2
Four weeks had passed since Klopp breezed into Liverpool, pledging to energise the club’s players and supporters in the same way he did those at Borussia Dortmund. From a distance, he had detected that “at this moment, all of the LFC family is a little bit too nervous, a little bit too pessimistic, a little bit too much in doubt. Nobody is really enjoying themselves. They don’t believe at the moment. It’s a really important thing that the players feel the difference from now on. We have to change from doubters to believers.”
He had already secured a 3-1 win away to Chelsea, but a week later against Palace they were labouring. At 1-1 the mood inside the stadium was frustrated. The moment Palace’s Liverpool-born defender Scott Dann scored to put his team 2-1 up in the 82nd minute header, Klopp was bewildered, then shocked, then appalled to see thousands of home fans streaming towards the exits. “I turned around,” he said, “and I felt pretty alone in that moment. We decide when it’s over.”
Klopp had come from Dortmund, where he felt the bond between his team and the supporters was unique. If he was to be able to replicate that anywhere, folklore, along with a powerful sales pitch from Fenway Sports Group, told him that Liverpool was the place. But this was nothing like the brochure. Anfield was a miserable, angst-ridden place where, as he had detected, nobody was really enjoying themselves. Something had to change. He wasn’t going to put up with a team or a crowd who made each other anxious.
Five weeks later they were 2-1 down again, this time at home to West Bromwich Albion. This time, in response to the manager’s exhortations, the crowd stayed put. Klopp kept gesticulating, demanding that they pumped up the volume to help his fragile team. The noise increased and Liverpool pushed forward, equalising through Divock Origi in the fifth minute of stoppage time. At the final whistle, Klopp responded by walking onto the pitch and leading his players towards the Kop where they lined up, looking a little sheepish, and held each other’s arms aloft to thank the fans for the support they had been shown.
Rival fans found it hilarious. Celebrating a 2-2 draw! At Anfield! Against West Brom! Liverpool’s supporters were divided between those who understood the gesture, which was the kind of thing that is common among German teams, and those who felt he had misjudged the climate spectacularly. But Klopp thought that an important message had been sent out that day. We decide when it’s over. It was going to take time to restore a feelgood factor, but that, he felt, was an important step
February 6 2016, Liverpool 2 Sunderland 2
“This has been glossed over by a lot of people,” Neil Atkinson, presenter of The Anfield Wrap podcast, says. “There’s almost a hint of shame about it, but I think it changed everything.”
Liverpool were 2-0 up against Sunderland when around a quarter of the crowd walked out. This was not an attempt to beat the post-match traffic. This was a symbolic gesture designed to highlight opposition to the club’s new ticket pricing policy. The policy included plans for a £77 ticket in the new Main Stand, so, on 77 minutes, at least 10,000 fans walked out in protest, singing “You greedy *******s. Enough is enough.”
Inside Anfield they share Atkinson’s belief that it was another significant moment. Only five years had passed since the internal infighting that had blighted their period under the ownership of American investors Tom Hicks and George Gillett. “There was no trust at that time,” one Liverpool official says. “There was no trust in the players and no trust in the club. The relationship was broken and desperately needed to be fixed.”
It had been broken for years. There had been two very different types of title challenge under Rafa Benitez in 2008-09 and under Brendan Rodgers in 2013-14, but Anfield was a fractious place, a world away from what Klopp had imagined. “In 08-09 it was the height of the battle with Hicks and felt as if everyone in the ground hated each other,” Atkinson recalls. “There was one game where we beat Portsmouth 1-0 to go top and, although we won, all I can remember from the whole of the second half is anxious fans screaming at each other to stop making everyone so nervous. ‘CALM DOWN, YOU.’ ‘SHUT UP, WILL YER.’ The first caller on 606 that night was someone saying Benitez should be sacked. It was ridiculous. We were top.”
Liverpool rode on the crest of an emotional wave in the 2013-14 season, coming so close to landing that elusive Premier League title, but by early 2016 Steven Gerrard, Luis Suarez and Raheem Sterling had gone and the relationship was at breaking point once more. So much goodwill towards FSG was shattered by the ticket scheme. Liverpool’s supporters felt as if, for all the club’s attempts to trade on the notion of the “12th man”, their support was being taken for granted.
Spirit of Shankly, the Liverpool supporters group, warned that pushing ticket prices higher, when clubs were already benefiting from increased Premier League broadcast revenue and prize money, would alienate the fanbase further. On that day against Sunderland, the fans walked out in protest. With the ground emptying, in what was now an eerie atmosphere, Sunderland turned a 2-0 deficit into a 2-2 draw. Did the Liverpool hierarchy think they could just name their price? The message here was that they would be making a terrible mistake.
Klopp was absent from that game, undergoing an operation to remove his appendix, but he appeared to side with the supporters, suggesting that the walk-out was a “sign” and that it was down to the club to “find a solution”.
FSG had already reached the same conclusion. Within days, they announced that the £77 ticket had been abolished and the most expensive matchday ticket would remain at £59. Rather than risk widening the gap between the club and the fanbase, they pledged to preserve the “unique and sacred relationship between Liverpool Football Club and its supporters”.
It felt like a significant victory for the Anfield crowd. It seemed to mark a change in the relationship between the board and the fanbase. “No fan wants to walk out on their team,” Atkinson says, “but that was a significant – not just to Liverpool but in a wider sense. If you look at it since then, almost every club in the Premier League has frozen ticket prices at some point.”
On the pitch, things had been starting to pick up under Klopp and the feelgood factor started to return with a stirring run to the Europa League final, beating Manchester United, Borussia Dortmund and Villarreal on nights that seemed to live up to a certain Anfield tradition.
“Coming back to beat Dortmund 4-3 was massive,” Atkinson says. “That was only a few weeks after Sunderland and it really helped bring everyone together. But the atmosphere against Villarreal was great too. It felt almost feral that night. It felt like the Europa League run really brought everyone together again. It also felt like that was the time was the moment that Klopp really became Liverpool manager in the eyes of the fans. And I’m sure it was also the moment where he thought, ‘Yes, this is Anfield.'”
Doubters – severely disgruntled doubters – were starting to become believers.
January 14 2018. Liverpool 4 Manchester City 3
By the dawn of 2018, Liverpool were going places under Klopp. They had finished fourth in the Premier League the previous season, playing some exciting football, and forced their way back into the Champions League. Players such as Sadio Mane and Salah were now on board. There were some neurotic moments on the pitch, when goalkeeping or defensive errors saw them drop points carelessly, but Anfield was now an optimistic place. Liverpool hadn’t lost there since a 2-1 defeat by Palace at the back end of the previous season.
One Sunday in January, Manchester City rolled up on Merseyside having gone 22 Premier League games unbeaten since the start of the season. They were already firmly on course for the Premier League title, but that day were served a warning that Liverpool’s resurgence was real. It was a performance in keeping with Klopp’s demand for the kind of intensity which, he believes, is impossible to produce without drawing on the energy of the crowd. In an eight-minute spell in the second half, Liverpool scored three times to go 4-1 up.
“That was an unbelievable occasion,” Atkinson says. “City seemed to be rattled by the atmosphere. The whole ’12th man’ thing, if we’re honest about it, is mostly bollocks, but that day it really was the case. This brilliant, brilliant City team, who had passed teams off the park all season, suddenly couldn’t string five passes together. Our lads were snapping into tackles and you could see them thriving off the adrenaline.”
The mood had been set the moment the Liverpool team arrived to fanfare from the supporters who lined Anfield Road, waiting to welcome the team bus. That has become another modern-day tradition. It dates back to a show of solidarity with Rafa Benitez before a game against Tottenham during the troubled 2009/10 season but really took hold when Liverpool were challenging for the title under Brendan Rodgers four years later. The fervour is at its greatest before a big game; it went way beyond acceptable levels on the day missiles were thrown at Manchester City’s bus before the Champions League quarter-final first leg a few months later, which was angrily condemned by Klopp. These days every game is a big one.
Stirring victories over City and Roma took them to the Champions League final. They lost to Real Madrid in Kiev, but supporters look back on that whole trip with a sense of wonder. The whole Champions League run had been an intoxicating adventure: the victories over City and AS Roma at Anfield, the fans’ takeover of Shevchenko Park in Kiev, new chants and a burgeoning relationship between the fans and a group of players who, in many cases, had been viewed with suspicion on arrival. Allez, Allez, Allez.
Liverpool 1 Leicester City 1 . January 30 2019
On a freezing cold night last January, Liverpool extended their lead at the top of the Premier League to five points. It was only the second time all season that they had dropped points at Anfield, their 33rd home Premier League game without defeat since April 2017, but nobody who was there that night saw it in such positive terms.
Manchester City had lost at Newcastle United the previous night and there was the strong feeling that this game represented a window of opportunity for a Liverpool team chasing the club’s first league title since 1990. On a hard pitch, against awkward opponents, they produced their worst performance at Anfield in a long time. They looked nervous.
Words that can be found in just about every match report that night include “tension” and “anxiety”. For much of that season, Liverpool’s supporters were indeed believers, but the Leicester game confirmed something unsettling: that, among players and supporters, the doubts were still there underneath the surface. “There was a level of anxiety that hadn’t been there all season,” Atkinson says.
The players recognised it too. The more nervous they had got, trying to recover from a poor spell in the first half, the more nervous the crowd had got. Debates raged afterwards on social media.
It was a conversation in the Liverpool dressing room that night and at their Melwood training ground over the days that followed. The players talked about it in much the same way they would have done if, for example, they felt an opponent had exposed a weakness at set-pieces. They had even felt that tension from the crowd during the pre-match warm-up. Led by Jordan Henderson, James Milner and Adam Lallana, they decided they were going to have to try to do something about it because, if there was a Premier League title to be won, they couldn’t afford for the atmosphere to be so fraught over the months ahead.
There were only ten days before the next home game against Bournemouth. A 1-1 draw at West Ham United in the meantime didn’t help one bit. Neither did Manchester City’s victory over Everton, which took them to the top of the table. But there were a few subtle steps taken in the build-up to the Bournemouth to try to ensure that the atmosphere was different.
It wasn’t a coincidence that, on the eve of the Bournemouth game, Sir Kenny Dalglish, the last man to lead Liverpool to a league title, sent a message of unity in an interview with the Liverpool Echo. “There’s no problem with nerves,” he said. “I think it’s normal to feel nervous. It’s anticipation. We have been brilliant this season, the support has been brilliant. For us, we’ve never, ever won a trophy in my time here without the help of the fans. When it gets towards the finishing line that’s when you need them most of all. If we can all stick together collectively that will give us a chance to move forward. The fans can get them over the line with their support. When it gets towards the finishing line, that’s when you need them most of all.”
On the same day, Liverpool’s official website published an interview with Lallana in which they asked how atmosphere can affect a team – positively or negatively. “It’s probably not just us they can have an impact on. It’s probably the opponents too,” the midfielder said. “I’ve played at grounds where it can feel intimidating and the noise is that loud and they’re getting behind the home team.
“Although I never came here many times as an away player, [the atmosphere] can have a negative effect on the opposition. As well as helping the players out, it probably has an adverse effect on the opponents. The season before I signed for Liverpool, 2013-14, I was aware of Liverpool’s interest in me so I was paying close attention to their matches. The atmosphere at Anfield in that run-in was epic. You just wanted to play for that team, in that team at that ground. It would be great if we can get similar atmospheres and a similar vibe around Anfield, during the warm-ups. They do really act as a 12th man.”
Klopp said something similar, urging “whoever wants us to succeed in this game and in general (…) to shout your soul onto the pitch.”
The Spion Kop 1906 group, which organises the flags and banners at Anfield, was on-message too. “Let’s get inside the ground early tomorrow and show the players we’re behind them from the warm-up,” the group said on Twitter. “We’ll be in from 2pm and we’ll need all the help we can get in the corner, so if you’re on The Kop, come down and give us a hand. Let’s give get the ground bouncing. Unity is strength.”
One other thing Liverpool’s players did in the build-up to that game was talk about the music that should be played in the stadium during the warm-up. You’ll Never Walk Alone was sacrosanct, but some of the players wondered whether, during the warm-up, there should be more emphasis on the type of upbeat, powerful music they had in the dressing room. Players were invited to come up with alternatives to pass on to the club.
One player proposed This is Me, as sung by the bearded lady in The Greatest Showman. There was laughter, but then they went through the lyrics and they felt it struck the right note: “We’re burstin’ though the barricades and reachin’ for the sun. We are warriors.” That went on the list, along with an acoustic version of the fans’ Allez, Allez, Allez chant and Dua Lipa’s One Kiss. George Sephton, the club’s stadium announcer and DJ since 1971, welcomed the requests and executed the players’ plan to the letter. It was considered a resounding success
It was precisely the kind of low-key Saturday-afternoon fixture when talk of Anfield’s legendary atmosphere can often seem wildly misplaced. On this occasion, the noise seemed relentless as Liverpool surged to a 3-0 win. Trent Alexander-Arnold said, “I’ve never seen it like that at a Saturday 3 o’clock game. The scarves, the flags, the banners. It was something I hadn’t really experienced. This is what we need to push on.”
If this all sounds like Liverpool’s players were still playing to the gallery, saying things for effect, it is worth looking back at what the Bournemouth defender Steve Cook said unprompted that day. “You could see that the crowd were going to play a major part in the game,” he said. “I haven’t quite heard an atmosphere like it.”
For the remainder of that season, Liverpool powered on. They beat Watford 5-0, Burnley 4-2, Tottenham Hotspur 2-1 (thanks to a last-minute own goal from Toby Alderweireld which seemed to conform to the old cliche of the Kop “sucking the ball into the net”), Chelsea 2-0 and Huddersfield Town 5-0 to take the title race into the final week. For all the talk about how the Anfield atmosphere might suffocate Liverpool, it was only in the away games, notably in draws at Manchester and Everton and fraught victories at Fulham, Southampton, Cardiff and Newcastle, that tension was apparent.
They reached another Champions League final, overpowering Barcelona 4-0 in the semi-final on what will go down as possibly Anfield’s greatest European night of all. A few days later they played Wolves on the final day of the Premier League season, hoping and praying for Manchester City to slip up away to Brighton and Hove Albion. Liverpool won their game, but their rivals prevailed on the south coast. The end of the dream? It didn’t feel like it that day. The atmosphere at the final whistle was one of defiance as the fans sang about winning the European Cup, which they duly did, before setting their sights back on the prize the supporters covet most of all.
January 19 2020. Liverpool 2 Manchester United 0
Seven minutes had gone inside Anfield when the Manchester United supporters started asking, “Where’s your famous atmosphere?”
It was not, in fact, a classic Liverpool v Manchester United atmosphere. There were times when it was extremely loud – when Virgil van Dijk headed Liverpool in front and, perhaps more so, when Roberto Firmino curled home what appeared to be a second goal before the VAR intervened – but other times during the first hour when it was simply contented. The home crowd were just enjoying the performance. For long periods, there was more noise from the away end as United’s supporters tried to keep their spirits up.
It would be plain wrong to suggest that every Liverpool home game is played to an ear-splitting soundtrack. There are games where that seems to be the case – Barcelona last May was perhaps the ultimate – but there are also spells when it falls quiet, sometimes for long periods.
The Anfield mythology drives rival supporters mad. Then again, when expressing frustration with the lack of noise when he was managing both Chelsea and Manchester United, Jose Mourinho spoke of the “beautiful” atmosphere at Anfield. Pep Guardiola spoke about it last season, saying, “The motto ‘This is Anfield’ is no marketing spin. There’s something about it that you will find in no other stadium in the world. They score a goal and over the next five minutes you feel that you’ll receive another four. You feel, smell and the rival players seem to be all over you.”
Ultimately, though, this isn’t about the difference between Anfield and other grounds. It is about how different it is to the Anfield that Klopp walked into in late 2015, when he and his players felt “pretty alone”, or the Anfield of the late 2000s, when the club was in the grip of a power struggle and, as Atkinson puts it, “it felt like everyone in the ground hated each other.” Right now, it feels like everyone in that ground loves each other.
Liverpool have now gone 52 Premier League games without defeat at Anfield. They are closing in on the club record of 63, set by Bob Paisley’s team between 1978 and 1981, even if Chelsea’s record of 86 games, between 2004 and 2008, remains a long way off. Perhaps the most striking thing about Liverpool’s record since April 2017 (42 wins and ten draws) is the number of times they have won tight games, often in the closing stages. Confidence breeds confidence. Success breeds success.
There have been times over the past decade when talk of Anfield as a fortress has been laughable. The 2010s saw three Anfield victories apiece for Crystal Palace and West Brom as well as wins for, among many others, Blackpool, Wolves, Wigan and Fulham. The nadir was a League Cup defeat at home to Northampton Town in September 2010. The attendance that night was just 22,577 and, in the grim final weeks of the Hicks-Gillett regime, with the unpopular figure of Roy Hodgson on the touchline, it really was a case of fear and loathing.
What Liverpool have right now, with Klopp, is the precise opposite of that. Is that simply the difference that top-class players make? Perhaps, but it is hard to avoid the feeling that this Liverpool team and this crowd, under the guidance of this manager, are propelling each other to new heights. There have been times in the not-too-distant past when new signings were regarded with distrust and more established players, with few exceptions, were tainted by previous failures. It was not a happy or positive place.
Henderson is one of those players who struggled, for years, to win the affection and the trust of the Anfield crowd. These days he thrives on it. During that tense final period against Manchester United, he was the one who was leading the way, chasing down opponents, making tackles, determined to snuff out any hint of an equaliser. His team-mates fed off that and so did the crowd. They love Henderson now, just like they love Alisson, Andy Robertson, Roberto Firmino, Mane and the rest. Trust and affection, lacking for so long, now appear total.
It is not unique to Liverpool; Atkinson says he sees something similar at Sheffield United under Chris Wilder, Wolves under Nuno Espirito Santo and even Southampton under Ralph Hasenhuttl. It was certainly something that was said of Dortmund under Klopp.
Klopp felt that, if he was to have any chance of his success on Merseyside, he and his players were going to have to connect with and energise the crowd in the same way. There have been a few bumps in the road – it certainly hasn’t happened overnight – but that connection now seems every bit as powerful as the one his team Dortmund thrived upon.
“I don’t take that atmosphere for granted,” Klopp told The Athletic afterwards. “At the moment, even in the living rooms in front of the television, there is a lot of passion around the world based on LFC and we can take the energy from that.
“They carried us through the difficult period. It is exceptional. The atmosphere is absolutely exceptional. Everybody is on their toes – everybody. I really love that relationship. The atmosphere in the stands and the relationship between the two is incredible.”
There was still some tension in the air in the final stages when United pushed forward in search of an equaliser – a few groans and shouts when Lallana gave the ball away deep in Liverpool territory and then Alisson hit the ball into touch when he was seeking out Robertson. But how tense can supporters really be when their team are already 13 points clear at the top of the Premier League, when Van Dijk is getting his head to every cross and Henderson is fighting for every loose ball?
Finally, in stoppage time, Alisson pounced on the ball in his own penalty area and, rather than run down the clock, he sought out Salah, left alone near the halfway line as United threw caution to the wind. Salah raced clear to score and Alisson, the goalkeeper, raced 100 yards to slide on his knees in front of the Kop in celebration. Anfield could no longer hold it in. “People piling on one another, everyone at the top of their voice, the thing no one has wanted to say, the unspoken truth,” Atkinson wrote afterwards on The Anfield Wrap. “We’re gonna win the league.”
And now just about everyone believes them, that by May – and perhaps considerably sooner – Liverpool will be champions of England for the first time in three decades. Anfield feels like a fortress once moreComment
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Laporte starts for City.
Think they might struggle tonight anyhow.Oh I don't know.Comment
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[ame]https://www.twitter.com/oilysailor/status/1218975134922440705[/ame]
[ame]https://www.twitter.com/oilysailor/status/1218987829713346563[/ame]
Oh why won't they embed. Oh they haveFootball without Origi is nothingComment
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Spurs getting a moral boosting win tonight, their next league game is at home to City. If Spurs win that and should we beat Wolves, our game in hand vs West Ham and Southampton and the gap would be 22 points
We'd need 6 wins from 13
Last edited by Norbs; 22-01-20, 11:21 PM.Comment
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4 more wins to qualify for CL next season.Oh I don't know.Comment
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BBC radio commentary wrongly called us 'champions elect' during the Utd Burnley coverage earlier. I thought it meant champions who are yet to be crowned?Comment
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I reckon Jack has it right, we're currently still competing and as we're not assured of being champions we shouldn't be referred as such. Just my thoughtsOriginally posted by dom9 View Post
https://forum.wordreference.com/thre...elect.3456374/Comment
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My understanding is that it means we're the expected champions. It doesn't mean it's mathematically impossible for someone else to win.Originally posted by Norbs View PostWas muß, das muß.Comment
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I think united are out of the race now.Glass Half Full
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