Liverpool look like one-and-done Premier League title winners

Most of the attention in the immediate aftermath of the Carabao Cup final was on Newcastle.

That’s obviously fair and correct. It will always be the case that the winners attract most attention after any cup final, even when it isn’t also a result that the entire football world is determined to gaslight you into accepting is the best and most wonderful and magical thing that ever did happen, and that if you aren’t thrilled about the uncomplicated and entirely unproblematic loveliness of it all then you are a bad person or at the very, very least a Sunderland fan.

No. It was good and correct for the focus to land on Newcastle’s excellent performance and long, long overdue success.

But now as the dust settles, as Ant and Dec and Alan Shearer awake on a Monday morning in many ways like any other yet in a world so, so different to the only one they had ever known, it is also time to ask a question of the losers. What next for Liverpool?

The short-term answer, and it’s a good one in fairness, is ‘They will win the Premier League and have a big f*ck-off party of their own’. And quite right too. They are going to do both of those things.

Still, though. An odd feeling about it all now, isn’t there? An unavoidable and extremely harsh but entirely human sense of anti-climax. Offered this exact season in August, every single Liverpool fan would obviously and immediately take it. You wouldn’t be able to move for all the bitten-off hands.

But offered this exact season six weeks ago, the answer would be entirely different. The hands would be less bitten. Quadruples are, by definition, long shots that almost never happen, but the dizzying speed with which a possible quadruple has been reduced to a mere single is still a bit of a headf*ck even if the single that remains is the very best single.

And there’s no doubt Liverpool have on occasion in recent weeks displayed a hitherto unseen vulnerability. The FA Cup shock at Plymouth could be dismissed for its sheer freakishness, and the league draws at Everton and Villa were never as disastrous as some giddy heads believed.

But they also weren’t great performances, and nor were either of Liverpool’s in the Champions League defeat to PSG. Or in an uncomfortably difficult home league win against what is quite possibly the worst Premier League team of all time. Or, now, in the Carabao Cup final.

In many ways, this was the most vexing of the lot. Even more so than the PSG non-performances. Liverpool are extremely good at cup finals that are not against Real Madrid, who have annoyingly and repeatedly proven themselves even better at cup finals.

After a League Cup final defeat to Man City a few months into Jurgen Klopp’s reign, he would never again lose a major final to anyone other than Real Madrid. Tottenham and most frequently Chelsea were all seen off one way or another, with UEFA Super Cup and a Club World Cup chucked in for good measure if you’re minded to include such things.

So for Liverpool’s first final under Arne Slot to produce such a complete pile of nothing where a plan and strategy and gameplan ought to have been has to be a bit of a concern.

With Trent Alexander-Arnold absent injured and Liverpool making the shock choice to replace Virgil van Dijk and Mo Salah with holograms for the big day at Wembley, Sunday’s game also offered a glimpse at one potential future timeline if things go badly from this point with the Contract Three.

And what that particular timeline showed us was a Liverpool team that is, well, distinctly ordinary.

This has been an unusual Premier League season. Liverpool have been very good and very consistent. They are worthy winners and yes we are trying to tread very carefully here. Because the question we now find ourselves asking is just how good are they?

The best team this season? Absolutely and without question. But they have achieved Man City-levels of dominance – and indeed Liverpool 2019/20 levels of dominance – and, well, we’re just not sure they’re actually anywhere near that level.

In summary: Liverpool are a very good side, and worthy champions. But that is all. They are very good, but they are not title-wrapped-up-in-March good. That, clearly, is far more of a criticism of Arsenal, Man City, Chelsea and the rest than it is of Liverpool, and we look forward to everyone definitely understanding this in the comments.

But it inevitably leaves us wondering what happens to Liverpool, to Arne Slot, after this season. It feels ever so slightly built on shifting sands until the futures of Van Dijk, Salah and Alexander-Arnold are resolved. It feels like Liverpool need to know what’s going on there, decisively, one way or another so that plans can be put into action.

One way or the other, Liverpool face an enormous summer. The continuity of playing staff that allowed the transition from Klopp to Slot to be so effortlessly smooth will not be repeated.

When Klopp was manager we were repeatedly guilty of underestimating Liverpool in the wake of one of their occasional fallow seasons. Is the danger now that people overestimate Slot’s. What if they just aren’t all that good once everyone else sorts themselves out? What if this isn’t the start of another great era.

Liverpool 2024/25 are not as good a football team as Liverpool 2018-2020 were. And that’s fine, nobody asked or expected them to be. But they really could be a one-and-done team rather than the start of a new legacy. There really might just have been some unfathomable alchemy in which Klopp’s squad and Slot’s steady hand could deliver one season of near-perfection, in the league at least.

But Klopp’s very best teams could misfire. Their points tallies in his peak years read 97, 99, 69, 92, 67, 82.

This year they’re going to get more than 82 and less than 97. Would anyone really be that surprised if next season it’s 60-odd again?

Click here to read article