After a 35-year wait, Liverpool fans finally saw their team cement themselves as undisputed kings of English football. Adam Beattie considers the significance of the achievement and how the day will be remembered by all those who lived it.
The sights and smells. A concordant release of pent-up energy flooding down Walton Breck Road, somehow simultaneously organic and co-ordinated in equal measure.
Ultimately, this was done at whichever point you allowed yourself to conceive it. For some, it might have been when Darwin Nunez inexplicably saved the day at Brentford, and, for others, it was as recent as the consummate if unfamiliar triumph at the Etihad.
Liverpool’s preordained strut to the league title had long since become a waiting game. The extent to which that was the case is subjective, but the upshot was inescapable.
Homemade jeopardy came from our frankly unreasonable yearning for a fairytale finish line. Our default setting leads us down that winding path because we are so unaccustomed to the straight and narrow.
Picture-perfect
When it became apparent that Tottenham could be the day, we drew a big red circle around April 27 in cup final ink.
Premier League titles are mathematically wrapped up at home much less frequently than you’d think – just 12 times since 1992 – and football seldom delivers the pay-off you feel your sacrifice entitles you to.
But we’re Liverpool fans. We’re needy, we’re irrational and we’re hopeless romantics. We were owed this because of past heartaches. We were short-changed in 2020 despite becoming champions at record speed.
None of us knew quite how to feel when Jean-Philippe Mateta clipped the underside of the crossbar to put this Liverpool side within a goal of immortality four days earlier, but there were more than a few sighs of relief when the final whistle indicated there was work still left to do.
Sunday was why. The Kop has never looked like that before and there is a chance it never will again.
Scouse exceptionalism can be a badge of honour on days like that. Newcastle fans fell over themselves to tell us how much better they Wembley’d than us in March, but the reality is that footballing utopias are relative to the beholder and come in all shapes and sizes.
It was 11 years to the day since Steven Gerrard slipped, allowing Demba Ba to knock down the first domino on Liverpool’s spiral towards a Premier League hoodoo of their own making.
Rafa Benitez had taken us agonisingly close five years before that. Gerard Houllier had a serious crack in 2002.
When Jurgen Klopp finally unlocked the door, outside forces had to get involved. It took a global pandemic to nudge this mythical day we had craved tantalisingly further from our reach.
The last leg of greatness
Liverpool were not to be denied. This is a city famous for its refusal to back down and for standing tall in adversity. Waiting a little bit longer for the party of a lifetime was a drop in the ocean.
The success of 2019/20 and everything that was missing when the i’s were dotted and t’s crossed were intrinsically linked to the emotions of Sunday, because this was one for us.
The size of the gap to those below meant we were always going to get the flowers on May 25 against Crystal Palace, but the way the cards have fallen allows us to effectively win the league twice.
Tottenham scoring first was priced into the script, it simply couldn’t have happened any other way.
Dominic Solanke got his first-ever goal at the Kop End to serve up a reminder that there was a football match taking place amid the festivities, but we had seen enough in December’s reverse fixture back to assure us that chances wouldn’t be in short supply.
We had spent the preceding days contemplating who might get the goal, but the moment of the day ended up being whatever you wanted it to be.
VAR did little to diminish the fervour induced by Luis Diaz’s equaliser, but it was Alexis Mac Allister’s rocket to consign Tottenham beyond arm’s length that restored rapturous order.
Cody Gakpo allayed the fears of even the most apprehensive among us and all I could think of from that point on was how much I wanted to see Mohamed Salah join the party.
One of the five surviving champions of 2020 in Sunday’s line-up, the Egyptian King has been a man possessed since the promise during Klopp’s swansong fell to pieces 12 months ago.
In May, he vowed that he and his peers would “fight like hell” to return Liverpool to the top table under the new regime, a bar-setting exercise like none other.
Somehow, he has surpassed his own sky-scraping standards, but a period of relative quiet through Ramadan and its aftermath unearthed tiresome but familiar late-season questions.
He is going to break records this season and will continue to do so until the day he waves goodbye. If this league title could belong to just one person, it would belong to him.
Eternal memories
Luckily, trophies don’t belong to one person. This one belongs to all of us, perhaps even more so than any of the 51 major honours that came before it.
Some rival fans strangely were offended by the marketing slogan of ‘this means more’, but to us, this title really does mean more.
It is a title win that bestows closure on the previous chapter, validation for the 24 who played their part in achieving the exact same thing five years earlier without the same strength of recognition.
It reconciles the near misses, not just the footballing ones but the shared experiences that make following a football team what it is. In stadiums, pubs, supporters clubs and living rooms.
The best part? It doesn’t have to stop there.
In the immediate future we have a trophy lift and the largest-scale parade the city has ever witnessed to look forward to.
Mid-term, we get to revel in being champions for the entirety of next season at the very least – Bramley Moore, Old Trafford, north London.
Beyond that, we have the most exciting Liverpool side we could hope for and a manager who is just getting started.
It is a position from which to build with countless openings for gratitude in the present. Klopp’s Liverpool showed us the sky is the limit but the stars still welcome dreamers.
Enjoy it. Life doesn’t throw you days like Sunday too often. More to come.
