Liverpool were never going to win this year

THERE’S always something a little bit sleepy about those early Saturday afternoon games, a feeling of a weekend and a league rousing itself back into life after a couple of days in hibernation.

They’re the prerogative of the television men of course, something flesh and blood, in-theground fans tolerate if resent, especially the away fans. An early start quite often means a very early start for the travelling support.

It’s against the rhythms of the traditional English football Saturday. The 3pm kick-off still exists for the majority of Saturday games, it’s simply the case that no team is certain of it any more.

For forty five minutes early on Saturday afternoon Anfield certainly seemed a sleepy enough kind of place. Neither set of fans got the old place rocking. Neither set of players gave them reason to.

It was ho-hum and so-so. For Liverpool it was very much in tune with much of their recent football. Those lightening starts from earlier in the season have given way to a much more becalmed version of what they can be.

For the denizens of the Kop that was nothing major to worry about. This was a clash between the top of the table – well near enough to it anyway – and rock bottom, which is where Swansea stood before kick-off.

Eventually Liverpool would find a way through. Winning and playing poorly, even against ostensibly the worst team in the league, usually speaks well of a team and for a set of supporters still dreaming of a first title since 1990 that would do very nicely indeed.

Not long after the second half resumed the folly of such thinking was brutally exposed. Six minutes in fact was all it took. A nothing ball out for a needless corner by Dejan Lovren followed by a familiar occurrence from the team in red – a complete and utter failure to deal with a corner.

Fernando Llorente got to the second ball and finished past Simon Mignolet. In the blink of an eye an already subdued Anfield was reduced to near eerie silence, save for the cheers coming from the away end.

The most shocking thing about it from Liverpool’s point of view was that they seemed to be considerably improved in defence this year. Just a week before they seemed to deal quite well with Manchester United at set-pieces.

In the event it took Swansea just another four minutes to breach the Liverpool rearguard a second time. This goal was as elegant as the first one was scrappy. Tom Carroll’s cross, Llorente’s header, a smooth transition, a rocket of a header.

Both strikes detonated a bomb under the sedate lunchtime atmosphere at Anfield. More significantly than that they detonated a bomb under Liverpool’s title pretensions. Or at least they would have done had Liverpool not found a way back into the game. Roberto Firmino stuck twice in the next seventeen minutes and all of a sudden those title pretensions didn’t seem quite so outlandish any longer. If anything such was Liverpool’s surging momentum that victory for the hosts seemed the most likely outcome. Had Liverpool won from there, from two goals down, it would have represented a huge fillip at the end of a disappointing January for the club. It would have shown them to have the resilience of champions. Instead it all fell apart in quite spectacular fashion. Chasing the game Jürgen Klopp brought on Daniel Sturridge and then Divock Origi. The decision to add Origi as well as Sturridge to the mix sundered the momentum Liverpool had built up by the time of Firmino’s second goal. When Liverpool could have been pushing forward and finishing the deal they were instead finding their footing all over again, as the Klopp shuffled the deck to accommodate the two strikers. It made it doubly difficult for Liverpool to respond when Gylfi Sigurdsson slotted home the Swans’ third. Indeed by the end of the game Liverpool were so utterly bereft of ideas that Klopp threw on Joel Matip as a poor man’s Peter Crouch. A depressing way for a game and a title challenge to fizzle out. The thing about it is that it really shouldn’t be that surprising. This Liverpool squad was never good enough to sustain a title challenge. The reliance the team have had on Sadio Mané and their decline in his absence says it all. As some commentators have noted Klopp and Liverpool have probably done themselves no favours when it comes to public perception by starting the season as strongly as they have. It raised expectations to a degree that was never going to be sustainable. Not when the club actually made a profit in its transfer dealings in last summer. To challenge Liverpool are going to have to splash the cash, something Klopp de facto acknowledged this week when he said that clubs simply weren’t willing to sell to the club in the January window. It’s probably no bad thing for Liverpool fans to get a dose of cold hard reality and even should the Reds manage to turn this current dip in form around and beat Chelsea in a couple of weeks time any talk of title challenges should be banished. Liverpool aren’t going to win the title this year. Thinking so only masks or detracts from the genuine progress that’s been made under Klopp.