City’s excuses were credible last season. Kompany left and wasn’t replaced, Laporte got an injury so they had no credible CB pairing. Aguero was injured for long periods, Sane was crocked, and Silva declined hugely. They also had the realisation that they weren’t winning the league as early as November and that fixed game at Anfield and focussed on the CL. Despite that they still posted a low 80s points tally. They essentially lost 4 of their best players and had the refs against them all season.
Apart from Van Dijk and Gomez, Liverpool haven’t lost any of their players from last season. Indeed they’ve actually strengthened by getting Thiago Minamino Jota and Tsimikas in with Oxlade Chamberlain returning and losing no key players.
It’s effectively the same team just missing two centrebacks. They’ve not even been that bad defensively though, and the loss of two players to injury doesn’t explain how a team can go from having what looks like the best player in the world in every position to Alexander Arnold looking like he’s won a competition to play football and Firmino looking like a bum. This is not a natural decline in a team, they’re looking at dropping from almost 100 points pace to mid 70s, freakishly mirroring their sudden rapid improvement 2 seasons ago. Which is convenient seeing as 2 seasons is the generally accepted limit that a team can supplement for before long term damage to players.
People will always deny it and it will never be proven that they doped but this has always been a bang average Liverpool team without any of the ingredients to win a league.
World class keeper - fair enough they had this
Defence - They had a kid at RB, a bloke from Southampton next to another kid at CB, and a player from Hull at left back,
Midfield - none of their midfielders score more than about 3 a season, none would be at the top of the assists charts
Striker - no natural number 9 you can bank on for 20 a season
You then looked at their squad depth and they had no decent cover for any single position on the pitch except perhaps midfield.
That is never a title winning formula even if the target was low 80s. It was never ever close to a formula for getting 90 plus points, but it was certainly nowhere near a set up that could go to almost 100 points for two seasons in a row! They were battering everyone home and away barely conceding a shot on target. The consistency of performances for two seasons was identical every single week from every single player. No one had a bad game, no one had injuries, no one got tired, no one player dropped their level ever. It was only an extremely fortuitous performance by Atletico, with some world class keeping by Oblak, and a howler by Adrian, that cost them winning two CLs in a row and a third final in three seasons.
They doped, it’s as clear as day, this team was a Frankenstein monster, James Milner trampling all over the likes of Kante and De Bruyne, their B team thrashing Barca 4-0 despite playing a few days earlier when Barca had rested. A sudden shoot up in performance levels to a level they’d never been at and now it’s all coming crashing back down.
Even before his injury Van Dijk was all over the shop. Patrick Balford embarassed him on opening day and then Villa made him look like a clown. Alexander Arnold has gone from being the best player in the world to arguably the weakest right back in the top 6. Their midfield now looks like the collection of average cloggers it is struggling to create. The front three have gone from the world’s best forward players to struggling to hit a barn door. Players don’t just all improve at the same time, and all decline at the same time.
They doped, and the league didn’t want City dominance so skewed VAR in their favour (in much the same way it a probably in United’s favour now). That is the story of the 2019/20 season. If people honestly believe that a bit of novel kick and rush tactics is enough to bypass all the limitations of that squad for 2 seasons in a way no other team in history has managed then that’s up to them but I’ve never seen anything like this team anywhere else and the rise and falls in form are comeltlelly an utterly unnatural .
