It’s no good Jurgen Klopp trying to make the special ordinary: the world is now watching Liverpool

Dad dancing is over. It’s Klopp dancing now, the kind of bullet-proof behaviour a coach can pull off when his team is six points clear at the top of the league. Jurgen’s other great contribution to the festive season is to place a Manchester City scarf around neutral necks in the hope a victory for the champions might intensify the title race.

After eight wins on the spin in December a ninth at the Etihad would uphold Pep Guardiola’s claim that Liverpool might just be the best club side in the world and leave a team as magnificently equipped as City pushing boulders up hills.

Who would have thought it possible to pull for City in the epoch of Guardiola dominance, a period in which City’s grip on matches has been so commanding that outcomes were all but assured before a whistle had blown? There is nothing so detrimental to the health of the game as a foregone conclusion. Watching City’s suffocating excellence had become a bore, opponents boarding up their windows and hankering down in the hope they might see out the storm.

Rolling back the tide

Liverpool’s stripe is just beginning to glow. They are yet to win a trophy under Klopp. Indeed it is 29 years since they last won the title. That kind of narrative sweep, a historic institution ascending the throne after so long is a hell of a tale. And with due respect to City, we are all so grateful to witness the rolling back of the sky blue tide, to have another team make a game of it.

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Was it only 18 months ago that those devoted red men, the Jamies Carragher and Redknapp, were bemoaning Liverpool’s defending at the start of the 2017-18 season when they opened with a three-all draw at Watford and shipped five at the Etihad in match four? Sniping away their frustrations in the Sky studios they wondered what Klopp had been doing all summer. Not doing defensive drills the inference drawn.

Maybe Klopp wondered too. Those were the days when Simon Mignolet was fighting for hegemony between the sticks with Loris Karius and Virgil van Dijk was still six months from changing the world. Now Dejan ‘calamity’ Lovren gets a game only because the estimable Joe Gomez is crocked and behind them all is Alisson: a keeper with hands the size of a satellite dish and the feet of Neymar Jnr. Well, you know what I mean.

Destiny

The swatting aside of Arsenal after falling behind at Anfield last week was almost evidence of a team being pulled along by destiny, as if it could not be any other way. There is a sense that this is their moment, that fate is calling Liverpool forwards. We have moved beyond the dynasty phase in football. The days of club dominance lasting a decade or two in the manner of Liverpool’s great flowering in the 70s and 80s and Manchester United in the first 20 years of the Premier League appear over.

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United are the last team to retain the title, completing a hat-trick of wins in 2009. Though the riches of Roman Abramovich and the Abu Dhabi royals have skewed the competition in favour of Chelsea and Manchester City respectively there is notional scope for any of the top six to challenge the monied monopoly. This then is Liverpool’s moment. Should they lose they would still be four points clear and favoured to convert that advantage.

Guardiola seems genuine in his embrace of the challenge Liverpool present, as if he has tired of all those one-sided victories. That said, Guardiola knows his words will be heard at Anfield and must be hoping the flow of propaganda from the Etihad might lower Liverpool’s guard. For his part Klopp is trying perhaps a little too hard to make the special ordinary, to maintain a sense of routine lest his players become consumed by the scale of what they might achieve. Maybe the dad dancing was a calculated move to shift the focus, to create room for his team to breathe.

Fat chance. The whole world is tuned in to this one, the latest edition of an emerging rivalry just waiting for its own ‘clasico’ brand launch; old money versus new, red versus blue, the Mersey-had derby. Okay, you have a go.