The title decider between Manchester City and Liverpool will take place on Sunday, 10 April – the day after the Grand National. It will be Becher’s, Valentine’s Brook and the Canal Turn in one.
This may have been Jürgen Klopp against Marcelo Bielsa but to a Liverpool side with the momentum of a runaway thoroughbred it represented a small brushwood fence.
The headline will be that Manchester City are in danger of squandering a 12-point lead, although this would be stretching a statistic. After a 2-0 win over Brentford on 9 February, Pep Guardiola was indeed a dozen points clear of Klopp but Liverpool still possessed two games in hand.
This was the second of them and after a final whistle that, mercifully, came after Liverpool’s sixth of the night, Klopp, accompanied by his players, marched across to the Kop and punched his fists into the sodden winter air.
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This is not the great title chase of 1982 when Liverpool, who were 12th after a 3-1 Boxing Day defeat to Manchester City, made up an 11-point gap. However, the climax will be rather more dramatic.
Then, Liverpool were chasing down Swansea, managed by John Toshack, and Ron Atkinson’s Manchester United – entertaining but deeply fallible teams. This time they will go face to face with one of English football’s most formidable machines.
Here, they were up against a Leeds side that appears to have broken down completely. They had not won at Anfield since 2001, when they relied on borrowing ever greater sums of money rather than hiring a cracked genius of a coach.
Partly because of injuries, partly because resources at Leeds have always been thin compared to the size of the club, cracks in Marcelo Bielsa’s game plans have been growing wider.
Virtually everyone who travelled to Merseyside from Yorkshire expected those cracks to be pushed wider. This was a club that over its previous 10 matches had been conceding goals at a rate of three a game.
There have been lambs transported to Liverpool’s Meat Market in the charmingly-named district of Old Swan who have crossed the Pennines with a greater sense of optimism.
From the moment Stuart Dallas, who was tormented by Luis Diaz, handled in the area, that goals-per-game ratio was always likely to be exceeded. By the end, it was doubled.
As he crouched down, watching the mismatch unfold through driving rain, you wondered how much left of Leeds there is in Bielsa. “This Leeds absolutely reflects the beliefs of their leader,” Klopp had written in his programme notes. Sometimes, you wish they wouldn’t. That they would compromise a little more.
There was a flag of Newell’s Old Boys, Bielsa’s first club and his greatest love, among the crowd. They still want him back. Bielsa will turn 67 in July and perhaps it is time to turn for home.
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Leeds’ first game back in the Premier League after a 16-year absence had been at Anfield in September 2020. It finished, breathlessly, 4-3 to Liverpool. “What a game, what an opponent, what a performance from both teams. What a spectacle.” Klopp had gushed afterwards. It set the tone for a season in which Bielsa’s methods would be fully justified.
There is usually one unexpected club that is dragged, bewildered, into the relegation places. Until Rafa Benitez’s removal it appeared likely to be Everton. Now, it is Leeds who look stricken.
Whatever their fate, it should not detract from Bielsa’s achievements. He has not only changed Leeds’ division; he has changed their image.
The ending may be messy – seven goals conceded to Manchester City, four to Manchester United and now six to Liverpool – but nobody, except for biographers of Don Revie, will talk of “Dirty Leeds” again. “Naïve Leeds”, “Hopelessly outplayed Leeds” yes but never dirty.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/mOKGrj6
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