Football is often compared to theatre. Sometimes it justistheatre. With 63 minutes gone at Anfield, and Liverpool already 3-1 up,Mohamed Salahtook the ball on the right in an empty square of deep green, veered inside, and then paused, leaving just enough time time for the entire home crowd to freeze the moment, to see a snapshot of what was about to happen.
Salah rolled the ball to his left then spanked it hard into the near corner, drawing a vast, rolling cheer that just didn’t want to stop, a self-fuelling cheer for this relentless one-man highlights reel,face of an era, the curator of moments, who then made another one here by taking a mid-match celebration selfie with the Kop.
Has anyone ever taken a mid-match selfie with the Kop before? What would Reuben Bennett say? Apart from something like “this isLiverpooland we do the best selfies here, son.”
And so, as widely trailed, and perfectly choreographed on a lovely powder-blue day, Liverpool won the title with four games to spare. Arne Slot’s team have led from the start right through to that romp along the final straight, and done it all with a sense of strength in reserve, one of the most unruffled displays of frontrunning in recent Premier League memory.
The only real question here was, would it still feel like a party, such was the buildup to a title win that has for some non-neutrals been somehow too easy, too free of jeopardy, basically too good.
Well, it did. They know how to do this around here, rolling out the grand old livery, firing up the familiar songs, slipping into the well-worn euphoria of a title day.
A 5-1 cuffing aside of a sleepy Spurs team was always going to have an end-of-term feel, a day for board games and Toy Story on the wheelie TV. But this was also a roll-over party in many ways, a dual celebration for the plague season, and for all those empty years before the last one. At which point there are two things worth talking about, and one thing not worth talking about, which will still be talked about all the same.
The last of these is the only real threat to the notion of this Liverpool team as significant title winners. This is the post-truth take, the idea that, yes, this team has run away with the league, but the real meaning here is that the league itself is flawed, that even a win is also somehow a loss.
Even if this were true – which it isn’t – it requires a feat of genuine cognitive dissonance to blame the champion team for the fact others are below par. It is also demonstrably untrue. English teams have thrived in Europe. The mid-tier is as strong as it has ever been.
Watch some old football. Check out the centre-backs out there lolloping around like shopping trolleys with a broken wheel. The real story of the Premier League this year is the big-brand teams being caught out by well-managed, agile middleweights. This is a sign of quality, ambition over entitlement, the lesson that too much flux is not what builds teams.
Not that anyone cared here. From the morning it felt like a flag day in the city, the streets dappled red, every corner thronged, like a street party for a republican coronation. Liverpool sunshine has its own distinct palette, something to do with the sea, the angles, the open sky, and this was a lovely, milky spring day.
Even the trains north had carried a gathering excitement, like a Whitsun wedding weekend, whoops and skirls down the platform at each stopping point, the feeling of Liverpool spread out in the sun up ahead. You got to smell Anfield before you saw it, the tang of flares in the air as the crowd thickened into strolling families and tourists here just for the event glamour. At the Stanley Park end the pre-match smoke became a genuine peasouper, the Liverpool bus appearing like an icebreaker emerging out of the mist.
It is a very nicely managed kind of theatre, the pre-match veneration, the papal welcomes, and a modern thing too, related in part to the difficulty of actually getting inside the ground. It is of course easy to dismiss all this as schlocky or over the top. But it is also a significant act, a reassertion of ownership over the spectacle. Football grounds are either income machines for a hedge fund or magical places just because people keep saying they are. One of these is better than the other.
Arne Slot’s team were up against perfect opponents. Ange Postecoglou had made eight changes before more urgent concerns in midweek. And Tottenham weren’t simply spectres at this feast, they were here just to service the feast, to the extent you half-expected the players to turn out for the second half in name badges and catering aprons. May I assist you with your feast sir? More gravy, perhaps?
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The Kop end was decked out in its full brocade of flags and banners and bedspreads. The colours were good, huge lush blocks of red, green, Spurs in just the right shade of complementary limp blue.
There was even an agreeable twist in the opening exchanges, Spurs taking the lead through Dominic Solanke’s header, then Luis Díaz equalising with a goal that was ruled out for offside, then reinstated by VAR, creating a static field that rolled around the Kenny Dalglish Stand, then leapt into the players on the pitch even before the referee pointed solemnly towards the centre-spot.
It was 2-1 on 24 minutes after a Klopp-tribute piece of counterpressing, Alexis Mac Allister smashing a shot into the top corner with exhilarating power. Cody Gakpo got the third before half-time, tiptoeing through the Spurs defence, realising the Spurs defence wasn’t actually there, then deciding to stop tiptoeing and just smash the ball into the corner.
It felt fitting Liverpool’s best players on the day were their midfielders, all three of them Slot projects carefully reconfigured this season.
Dominik Szoboszlai is such a fun footballer to watch, impossibly handsome in a skiing-out-of-a-helicopter kind of way, but also, in a piece of sporting irony, prosaic in his day job, which is to work and chase and create a weather front of pressing. Mac Allister was spiky and creative. Ryan Gravenberch cruised about creating order.
This was a great day for Slot, the best of his career, and one that sets up its second half, the ever-changing challenges at this level. As ever Slot was out on his touchline looking shiny and spiffily dressed, like a much loved local dairy farm magnate here to collect a municipal award. But what has impressed most is his understated toughness, a triumph of intellect and care over show and bombast.
The entire Slot persona is an interesting comment on what it means to win, and on what confidence looks like. Slot is not buccaneering or openly aggressive. But he has also been quietly insistent from the start, never talking about rebuilds only the need to win. He has accepted this was always, to some degree, going to be a case of flowers for the Klopp era, but also marked this triumph as his own, most notably in the sunlit stroll of the early season, that sense of a team falling back in love with itself.
The real test of all this will come in the necessary rebuild of the next couple of years, the need to add rather than just reconfigure. The defeat to a very good Paris Saint-Germain and the lack of energy in the Carabao Cup final are the only marks on the season. The best part of Slot is that he will clearly have these in mind just as much as the notes of glory along the way.