Liverpool’s premiership season gets underway tomorrow. I’m filled with more fears than I can remember in recent years, but only because my hopes are greater than ever before.
My only wish for last season was to be involved in a title race: at first by Christmas and then by Easter. I got all I wanted and more. After the win against Villa I really believed we would win the title.
Now, we need to win it. Rafa needs to win it to prove to his doubters that he is the right man to take the club forward. He needs it to instil further confidence in his project for root and branch reform of the club.
Winning the title is tough. The margins are fine and the variables significant. We go into the new season with a machine with some key parts changed, not just small upgrades on the edges. The loss of Alonso may lead to a better team but it really changes the way the team will play. The notion that his replacement, Aquilani, plays between Mascherano and Gerrard is a threat to the balance of the team. No transfer is certain to be a success.
Glen Johnson looks like a good signing but around him the defence is quite uncertain. Carragher is a year older – and currently injured. Agger is out (again) and Skrtel had some injury problems pre-season. The idea of Ayala or San Jose starting against Crouch and Defoe doesn’t inspire me with confidence. And it places more pressure on young left-back Insua, who often had Carra in his ear last season.
I love watching Liverpool play as a unit. But it is a well-drilled unit. And that’s why the change to midfield could be as tricky to manage as the attempt to introduce Keane was last season: and that experiment didn’t work out.
It doesn’t help that we play Spurs again – in consecutive premiership games. Spurs away is always tough and often a draw. Yet a draw will put pressure on the team early on and the media will not mention that Man United drew at the start of last season. The talk will be of the draws last season that cost us the league.
And for another year, the Premiership is weaker, less competitive. Manchester City’s millions is not ‘good for the game’ as so many suggest. It’s just a different badge on players who have been bought in to buy success. City the team may as well be a franchise. The future for Wolves and Burnley fans will be defeats followed by relegation – with heroic battles along the way whilst fans of Portsmouth and other big spending small clubs desperately hoping that financial meltdown will be kept at bay another year.
I hope that we can do it, I really do. And yet if we don’t (presuming we make a good fist of it) I probably won’t be disappointed. But I will be nervous. Nervous that it will threaten the rebuilding of Liverpool. Nervous of the threat of a Man City or another newly-wealthy club usurping our place. Nervous of what the debt piled on Liverpool will mean for its future. Nervous that it’s getting easier for players to be mercenary. But hopeful that 18/5 will become 19/5 or even 18/6.