Hello. We all love a quiet, lazy day at work, and I’ll elaborate on this theme as soon as I’ve finished ordering a new toaster. For us normal folk, some days are much busier than others, and we’d struggle to function if we had a huge deadline every time we walked into the office.
Yet that, pretty much, is what Liverpool have had to deal with in their Premier League day job for the last 14 months. Since the start of last season they have played 47 games, knowing before each one that they could barely afford to draw, never mind lose. It’s not like the old days, when title races didn’t really get going until the new year. Jose Mourinho changed that culture, and Pep Guardiola has made the pace even more demanding. These days, a title race is a marathon and a sprint.
Liverpool have won 38 of those 47 matches, losing just one at the Etihad Stadium in January. It’s a miracle of concentration, resilience, self-belief endurance and excellence – especially as they don’t yet have anything to show for it.
All they can do, cliche fans, is take each game as it comes. Some are tougher than others – today’s Champions League final reunion with Spurs, for example, has a slight whiff of danger about it. But they go into every game knowing that that sly old sage Vanilla Ice was right all along, and that anything less than the best really is a felony.
There are no lazy days at the office coming up for Liverpool. No sickies, no holiday, no Tweetdeck, no fag breaks, no long lunches, no watercooler chit-chat, no urge-driven browsing, no early finishes. It’s immensely hard work. But the potential prize – a first title since 1990, and Anfield immortality – is worth it.
Kick off is at 4.30pm.
