Professional party pooper Jose Mourinho has chance to wreck a lifetime's work for Liverpool's Steven Gerrard

 
Getty
15 April 2014

“It felt like the clock was going backwards.” A slightly misty eyed Steven Gerrard blinked his way through the interviews after Liverpool’s 3-2 win over Manchester City yesterday, trying to clear his eyes of — what was it? Tears? Sweat? Simple disbelief?

Liverpool’s captain has given his career — more or less unwaveringly — to the club, aware that the chances of his commitment being rewarded with a Premier League winner’s medal were slim to non-existent.

Now, as he pointed out to his team-mates on the pitch yesterday afternoon, there are four games to win before a fondly held fantasy becomes mad fact.

The past weighs heavy on Liverpool this week — as if you hadn’t noticed. It is more than just the grim memories of Hillsborough, 25 years on and as ghastly and unclosed a case as ever, remembered but not resolved by silent minutes in now safe English stadia. The clock is going backwards in another sense, too. Two decades of Mancunian domestic dominance has made the idea of Liverpool winning the League an entirely retro concept.

There are men in their mid-twenties who have grown up on stories, rather than memories, of Liverpool as English champions. Gerrard himself was only eight the last time it happened. So the next four games are, for him, very literally the culmination of a lifetime’s work.

Finally he is dragging the club forwards, into the glory of the past.

Sport and sportswriting is full of false importance and sexed-up sentiment. But if Liverpool win their next four games, and sweep up the Premier League, they will have achieved something genuinely meaningful, life changing and life affirming to thousands of people on Merseyside.

Nothing is sealed yet — and four matches is a long time in football. All the same, their form, their style and their self-belief makes it difficult to see them screwing it up from here.

Led by the wholly admirable Brendan Rodgers — compare the way he talks and acts with David Moyes, and you’ll understand pretty much everything you need to about the relative positions of Liverpool and Manchester United this season — Liverpool are doing everything right.

Chelsea player ratings (Swansea v Chelsea)

1/14

Slick, fast, attacking, adventurous, brave, determined, dominant and emotional, they have an agreeably English core supplemented by foreign pizzazz.

The best of this was on show in the first half yesterday, with the Suarez-and-Sturridge-and-Sterling front three tearing City to bits. SASAS? It sounds like a Latin American dance, or an orientalist department of the University of London. But these three have been electric for Liverpool again and again this year. (Aside to Roy Hodgson: replace Suarez with Rooney and build England on RASAS in the World Cup.)

And yet. There go Chelsea. Jose Mourinho is a professional party pooper and his history with Liverpool has an ugly edge to it.

Having snuck past Swansea yesterday, Chelsea could still go to Anfield on April 27 and convert those tears of anticipated joy into the bitter sobs of misery. Two points ahead with four to play? The title is in Liverpool’s hands. Ah, but it is also in Chelsea’s. History has yet to be written. Don’t look away.

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