So Liverpool’s season is going to end up as an anticlimax? You’ve got to be joking!

SO let me get this right: Liverpool are 25 points clear at the top of the Premier League, they won 26 of their first 27 games and obliterated the best of the opposition and because they finally lost a game, at Watford, we are supposed to recalibrate their season as a brush with disappointment and ordinariness? Seriously?

It is funny when you think about it. Surely you can see that. They lost at Watford and got knocked out of the FA Cup by Chelsea and that is supposed to destroy their claim to greatness? This is a team that reached the final of the Champions League two seasons ago, won it last season and are racing away with the title this season. Not exactly a bad run of form.

Everyone has their own idea of greatness for a football team. My own benchmark is probably the Manchester United side of 1998-99.

Some say that was not even Sir Alex Ferguson’s best United side but they won a Treble that had never been won before and has not been won since. Liverpool won’t do that this season but that does not mean this is not a great side.

So perhaps they will only win one major trophy. So what? If they do, that’s OK. Because the one trophy will be the Premier League. It’s not like it’s a consolation prize. They have already won the Club World Cup for a start and, whether you count that as a major trophy or not, it’s not like, dare I say it, they are going t o be l eft with t he Community Shield.

Yes, yes, I know, Jose Mourinho and Pep Guardiola t hi nk t he Community Shield counts as a major domestic trophy. Well, it doesn’t. Maybe the Super Cup is coveted in Spain, although the fact that they played it in Jeddah this season suggests it may not be prized too highly.

Anyway, it doesn’t change the status of the Community Shield. The Community S h i e l d is a pre-season friendly and it doesn’t matter how many times Mourinho holds up three fingers or Guardiola shows us four fingers. It’s still a pre-season friendly.

You may have noticed that the greatest managers tend not to go l arge on t heir r ecord in t he Community Shield when they are winning the biggest prizes in the game like the Champions League or the Premier League. When pickings are slim, though, it is often a different story. Being 25 points behind your rivals can do strange things to a man, even Guardiola.

The glee that poured forth when Liverpool lost at Vicarage Road was hardly a surprise. It is part of football — and, indeed, much of modern life — to take as much pleasure, maybe more pleasure, in the misfortunes that may be visited upon a rival than in one’s own achievements. It is nothing new.

I t does f e e l , however, t hat Liverpool’s march on the title this season has spawned more bitterness and jealousy and more crackpot conspiracy theories than the triumphs of others in past seasons. Liverpool are only so far ahead, apparently, because VAR has been rigged to favour them above everyone else. Yeah, right.

For a start, if the people who operate VAR were smart enough to rig it, they wouldn’t have made such an a l mi g h t y me s s of implementing it in the first place.

And Liverpool are only so far ahead, apparently, because the rest of the league is so bad. Yeah, right.

That’d be the same league won by a Manchester City team the year before who played some of the most sublime football many of us can remember seeing in t his country and, in 2017-18, racked up a record points total.

The more interesting question is why there has been so much joy in Liverpool’s blip. Partly because they have been so good this season, perhaps? No one likes predictability. And maybe partly because some remember the stranglehold they used to have on the English game and have enjoyed t heir t hree decades of drought too much to let go now. Yes, United fans and Arsenal fans breathed joint sighs of relief when they lost. There was to be no Invincibles season for Li v e r p o o l to r i v a l Ars e n a l ’s r e ma r k a b l e a c h i e v e me n t of 2003-04. Nor was there to be any r epeat of t hat United Treble winning season of 1998-99.

Maybe it goes deeper than that, too. Maybe Liverpool’s imminent triumph this season will spoil a lot of people’s fun. Many Liverpudlians feel they are marginalised by the rest of the country. They feel the city is l ooked down upon, its population l a mpoo n e d , even ostracised sometimes. Winning the league in the Seventies and Eighties used to be Liverpool’s two-fingered salute to that kind of prejudice.

Kenny Dalglish and Ian Rush, Tommy Smith and Emlyn Hughes, Ray Clemence and Kevin Keegan, Alan Hansen and Mark Lawrenson and Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley were the only aristocracy they needed and the only authority they respected.

Their triumphs gave the city a civic pride that could not be touched when governments were hacking away at its infrastructure. It was something that made the city the envy of the country. They lost that pride for 30 years but now, finally, it is about to return.

So don’t tell me that this season is going to be a disappointment for Liverpool. Don’t tell me it’s going to be an anti-climax. Don’t make me laugh by saying that, in some way, it will be an underachievement.

For winning 26 of their first 27 games in the league, for obliterating the opposition, for leading the table by 22 points at the beginning of March, for winning the title for the first time in 30 years and for restoring to the city something that is a symbol of its cultural worth, this Liverpool side will be remembered as a great team.

A loss at Watford and getting knocked out of the FA Cup at Chelsea doesn’t make a blind bit of difference. Guardiola can hold up four fingers all he wants but Liverpool will be content with sticking up two to everyone else.

The rest of the country will just have to suck it up.