It's the penultimate weekend in the Premiership and still things are only a little clearer in this year’s race.
The main attraction this weekend was Chelsea’s trip to Anfield, home of once proud Liverpool. It was being billed as Liverpool’s last meaningful contribution to the season after their unhappy Europa League exit at the hands of Athletico Madrid on Thursday. It also raised the intriguing prospect of the Reds inflicting a potentially lethal blow to Chelsea’s title hopes and thereby handing it to arch rivals Manchester United. In many quarters the suggestion that this might be a game Liverpool would be happy to lose in order to avoid the catastrophe of United nosing ahead of their own 18 title wins was aired seriously. In the press, Sir Alex Ferguson applied the pressure by saying that he expected Liverpool to be more professional than this.
Reference was also made to the 1993/44 season, where Liverpool were again cast in the role of kingmaker facing United’s then title rivals Blackburn Rovers, led by Kop legend Kenny Dalglish, on the final day. That day, Liverpool beat Blackburn but United failed to get the win they needed and the title went to Blackburn anyway.
If anything, antipathy between the two most successful Northern clubs has grown since then, and the sense of embitterment settled across the Mersey has been intensified by the Reds’ poor season and by the issues surrounding the ownership of the club and the position of their manager Rafael Benitez.
In the event, Chelsea brushed a sorry Liverpool team aside with an embarrassing lack of drama that must have hurt even the most fervent anti-United elements in the Kop. The first goal was even handed to the bullish Didier Drogba from a suicidal back pass by Liverpool heartbeat and Kop legend, Steven Gerrard. Frank Lampard added a second (his 21st in the league this year – the fifth season running the midfielder has passed 20 for the season), and that was pretty much it.
United, dogged professionals that they are, kept the title race going until the last day, by toughing it out and beating Sunderland 1-0 in a nervy encounter, chiefly memorable for a couple of comical misses by the unfortunate Dimitar Berbatov. United and Chelsea both have comfortable home fixtures next weekend (against Stoke and Wigan respectively), and there seems to be little room left for United to overtake Chelsea.
Liverpool’s loss officially ruled them out of making 4th place and the last Champions League spot; this will almost certainly go to the winners of the Man City/Tottenham game on Wednesday. It caps a miserable season for Liverpool that will surely see the end of Benitez’s time at Anfield – he is widely reported as being the next Juventus manager.
There must now be a genuine (and not entirely unfounded) concern that Liverpool may be on the point of a serious decline, with the rise of uber-rich Man City and the fact that either they or Tottenham will be taking Liverpool’s place at the Champions League trough. With Benitez leaving, the exit of their two or three genuinely world class players may well be on the cards. (Fernando Torres, for example, is unlikely to want to be playing in the Europa league next season…)
On top of this, the club was officially put up for sale by their squabbling American owners. In a far from booming market, buyers for a period Merseyside property in need of serious modernisation and almost total re-wiring may well be hard to find…
