Liverpool 6-0 Leeds United: Impossible - The Square Ball 24/2/22

FAITH

Written by: Moscowhite • Daniel Chapman

Only Liverpool win games at Anfield so this is only partly about a result. It’s more about self-esteem, because the core memory of Leeds United won’t let go of the idea that we do this to teams, like beating Southampton 7-0 in 1972, but they don’t do it to us. And certainly not as easily as Liverpool (6-0) and Manchester City (7-0) have done it to us this season.

It’s hardly surprising that Liverpool won this game. Browsing the stats, it was hard to imagine a numerical model built better for beating Bielsa’s Leeds. Liverpool have applied more pressure and made more tackles in the attacking third than any other Premier League team this season. They’ve had the most shots, and the most shots on target, and shoot from nearer to goal than every other team but Brentford. They haven’t lost at Anfield in the Premier League all season, and had won their last seven in a row there. Only Manchester City are ahead of them, who before losing to Tottenham at the weekend had also won seven in a row at home.

What those strings of wins say is that playing Liverpool or Manchester City is more about them than you. What hurts is being powerless, like Southampton were in 1972. The shock to self-esteem is in becoming a bystander to excellence, rather than dictating it or resisting it. The upwards flow of money towards money in European football has put the Premier League’s top two into realms Barcelona and Real Madrid used to occupy unchallenged in La Liga, when they each beat every other team and the title was settled by El Clasico and rare mistakes against the peanut gallery of lesser clubs. I used to tune in to Spanish games, trying to see the best of Lionel Messi and co by picking matches against teams I assumed would give them a challenge. Our old Champions League foes Deportivo La Coruna, for example: they’d go to the Nou Camp and lose 5-0. Valencia? Beaten 4-0. Their teams were packed with great players, they’d qualify for Europe, but at the Nou Camp, every quality was nullified and trampled. A team like Sevilla might finish 3rd. Barcelona would beat them on aggregate 7-0.

Pep Guardiola is partly personally responsible for turning cash reserves into total dominance in three European leagues. In a way it has been a privilege to watch his teams defining this era of football the way, for example, Leeds dominated the English First Division at the end of the 1960s — five post-promotion seasons during which Leeds won more games and lost fewer than any other team. When Leeds won the league in 1968/69, they did it with more points, more wins and fewer defeats than any previous champion. We hadn’t even got to the part where we were backheeling around Southampton yet.

We’re seeing in Guardiola’s obsession, and in Jurgen Klopp’s constant angst, a pursuit of perfection being backed by limitless resources. These two teams are the best in the world at what they do and have been for years. In 2018 Manchester City won the league by nineteen points. In 2019 Liverpool were a point behind, but 25 points clear of 3rd. In 2020, Liverpool won by eighteen points from City, who were fifteen points ahead of 3rd. In 2021, Manchester United were City’s ‘challenger’, twelve points behind. Sometimes you have to remind yourself that competing with these sides has become an illusory idea, but it has come to dominate everybody’s thinking. By coming second last season all Ole Gunnar Solskjaer did was move closer to being sacked, for only winning 21 games, for only scoring 73 goals.

Visiting their grounds is like entering another world, separate from the Premier League, where the physical laws are different. Debates about playing styles or tactics are largely irrelevant because Liverpool and City lose so rarely that, if you do beat them, it won’t be with a strategy anyone can copy or repeat, even you. Norwich, for example, posed a problem for Liverpool on Saturday, but it was solved with twenty minutes of simple effort so that in the end the result was what it always is: a Liverpool win. Playing them is about picking the way you’ll lose the game and hoping that you won’t.

Blind faith is what Marcelo Bielsa is being accused of as goal after goal sails past his team as if the opponent was just a vague idea not to be considered or countered. His stubbornness is supposedly at fault, his unwillingness to change — his lack of cynicism. I don’t think persisting with his style against Manchester City or Liverpool makes him any less cynical than anybody else when they go there. It’s a bitter, realistic calculation that beating these teams is so unlikely that it isn’t worth the extra resource and effort of producing a bespoke plan to try. Bielsa has a method he believes will beat enough of the teams around Leeds to gain a respectable league position and have some fun playing attacking football along the way. And when you play the top two teams, you might as well stick to it and see what happens, as change everything to an unfamiliar style and lose anyway.

After all, we were good enough to take five points from them last season, to get through at home unbeaten against the top four. Bielsa’s Leeds were among the few who could brake Liverpool and Manchester City’s sickening relentlessness, playing with the same ideas that this season got them beat 6-0 and 7-0 (he dismissed suggestions that anything changed tactically in last spring’s draws with Liverpool, Chelsea or Manchester United, saying the players were just learning to do the same things better). It’s interesting to contrast the reactions to the games. Last season, those results — even the opening day defeat at Anfield, conceding four — supported Leeds fans’ idea of themselves as the true lights of an alternative to the monied might of Premier League football, wrapping Bielsa’s ideas with Leeds United’s history to forge a new identity that, even in defeat, was making a point about what defined us against them. This season there are hundreds of debating posts across the internet arguing Bielsa should be sacked for trying the same things he tried last season, that worked then and didn’t now. It’s the price of football, that if you achieve the near impossible once, it’s worthless if you don’t do it again. But the impossible games aren’t how we should measure a coach or a team, not by the defeat, nor the victory. The win over Manchester City last season wasn’t a true measure. But we let it define us anyway, to the extent even Stuart Dallas was bemused when his winner won goal of the season.

The pain of this 6-0 defeat at Anfield, and the 7-0 at the Etihad, is in discovering that what we’d bought into was something that can’t be repeated. The spectaculars of last season, bloodying the noses of clubs we’d been away from for sixteen years, allowed us to think we’d arrived back in the Premier League as genuine contenders, immediately taking our place again as if it was still 1992 or 1972. That was never really true. Manchester City and Liverpool have made that very clear this season. We aren’t who we thought we were because we thought a dream — beating Manchester City once — would become something real. Instead, it turns out we’re just like everybody else.

The anger among Leeds fans now is justified by the games against everybody else. Leeds should have beaten Newcastle and Everton. And several others. Then whatever might happen at Anfield becomes easier to take. As it is, we went looking for the games against Manchester United and Liverpool to answer for the games against Newcastle and Everton. That was never likely to work. This week had to be about getting through with the least damage possible, then starting the rest of the season at home to Spurs. The scorelines on Sunday and Wednesday are what they are now. The question of damage is harder to quantify. Leeds were good against Manchester United and started well against Liverpool. By the end at Anfield they looked broken and dejected and now they have hours, not days, to prepare for a much more important fixture. They can beat Spurs but it’s hard to believe in it. They can stay up but it’s hard to believe in it. But from the day Marcelo Bielsa arrived, fourteen years into our exile from the Premier League, we’ve been asking and expecting him to do impossible things, and he’s done them. What we’re asking him to do, now, should be easy. But it hurts that it’s not the dream we thought it would be, because who wants to dream only of possible things?