Greatness can wait

“TEN games from greatness,” proclaimed Gerard Houllier of his Liverpool side in 2002. But it was not to be for the 2001 Treble winners as Arsenal stormed away with the title. One hesitates to taunt the football gods quite so brazenly now but, however you look at it, this Liverpool are four games from immortality.
They may not yet be great, perhaps not as good defensively as Houllier’s team, but if they were to win the league, the 2014 vintage would be remembered forever.
Even if they’d been eking out ugly 1-0 wins, fans would recite their names for decades to come should they be the ones to end a title drought that Scousers already feel is long enough to be measured by carbon dating.
That they are closing on it in such glorious fashion, sweeping aside teams before they’ve even worked up a sweat, is a story the like of which we did not expect to see again in these stat-driven, style-smothering days. And that is not the only trend that Liverpool are sensationally bucking.
If they do manage to lift their 19th title it will be the first time that anyone has soared from seventh to first in 12 months since Everton in 1984, and the first time in Premier League history. Such upward mobility was thought impossible in an era of meticulously calibrated super clubs, the previous best in the Premier League being third to first.
As if all that were not enough for a place in the pantheon, half the team is home grown, the Reds having spent only a fraction of their opponents’ outlay. Thanks to Brendan Rodgers’ (caricature) brave young entertainers, the game’s tectonic plates could be shifting.
But they haven’t won it yet and as we saw on Sunday, they came close to surrendering the initiative to City. They have the momentum and they also have the luck, Luis Suarez somehow avoiding a second yellow for a blatant dive, and then Martin Skrtel escaping a penalty.
Worryingly, the SAS partnership did not quite click and Suarez reverted to the chicanery we thought he’d abandoned. Daniel Sturridge was also off-key and it was left to the rapidly-maturing Raheem Sterling to show the composure that deserted his senior partners.
City will rue their bad luck as well as their decision to play a patently unfit Vincent Kompany. Like Wayne Rooney a few days earlier, the City skipper showed that even a top player can be a liability if he’s not 100% fit.
With Yaya Toure possibly out for the rest of the season and Kun Aguero nowhere near match-sharpness, the momentum may well remain with Liverpool.
Of their six remaining matches, Manuel Pellegrini’s men have four eminently winnable home games but two tricky visits – to a rejuvenated Crystal Palace and Champions League-chasing Everton. Although they showed some mettle in coming back at Anfield, it is not quite how the head honchos at the Etihad would have seen this season’s denouement when they authorised a £100m spending splurge last summer.
As injuries to Kompany, Aguero and Toure have clearly shown, City are well short of having two world-class players for every position. They also don’t seem to be quite a team – lacking the industrial-strength bonds that bind Liverpool.
The Reds also have to go to the Tony Pulis-invigorated Palace but by far the most awkward fixture they face is at home to Chelsea. The last opposing manager Liverpool would choose to face in a title race is Jose Mourinho who, besides having the trophy as an incentive of his own, still has not forgotten “the ghost goal” of that famous 2005 Champions League semifinal.
If anyone can put one over a side on an unstoppable run it is the Machiavellian Portuguese and Liverpool will be wary of him.
Fortunately for the Reds, the Blues go to Anfield in between the two-legs of their clash with Atletico Madrid – another reason to believe luck is on Liverpool’s side.

There was something almost karmic in the potentially decisive game coming two days before the 25th anniversary of Hillsborough and while Liverpool fed off the emotions, City seemed as if they’d stumbled into someone else’s ceremony.
So what does all this tell us? Is it an aberration in the measured moneyed scheme of things? Indeed, you wonder what the watching John Henry, he of Moneyball fame, makes of it.
Well, it has shown that you can’t keep a great club down forever and that if, in a season when other super clubs are either in transition or decline, you put together a decent side under inspired leadership and go for it, anything is possible.
Rodgers has been brilliant in his man-management and insistence on attack as the best means of defence. He is a true modern manager and has used a psychologist that he calls “my best signing” – but old school enough to play to his strengths, turning Steven Gerrard, once a reticent leader, into Captain Marvel and keeping hold off Suarez.
Their success – and it is a success no matter what happens now – is ahead of schedule and has seen an amazing winning run. Greatness can wait.
And reassuringly for romantics, what Liverpool are on the cusp of achieving is not down to Moneyball or scientific claptrap – it’s down to some breathtaking attacking football. Bloody Hell indeed!