The nadir came in the autumn of 2010. Liverpool were tottering on the brink of administration, they had hated owners – Tom Hicks and George Gillett – and an unpopular manager, Roy Hodgson.
They also played dreadful football and tumbled into the relegation zone. It was a time for depression, alleviated by a blend of black humour and Scouse wit.
At the city’s John Lennon airport, the statue of the former Beatle read: “Above us only sky.” Someone had added: “Below us only Wolves and West Ham.”
Now as Liverpool gaze upwards, they see no one above them. They are flying.
They have won nine games in a row. They have gone up six places in 11 months, 17 over three-and-a-half years. They are five games from immortality, five games from ending a 24-year wait to assume what was once their annual title of champions of England.
They are looking forward, not with trepidation but with anticipation. Anfield expects, but the pressure seems strangely liberating.
This is reminiscent of 2005, of Liverpool’s logic-defying Champions League triumph where limited players and club legends somehow combined to acquire an irresistible momentum.
Sunday’s encounter with Manchester City is the biggest game at Anfield since it played host to a Champions League semi-final, in 2008.
Liverpool mounted a title challenge the following year, but Rafa Benitez’s team were playing catch up. Brendan Rodgers’s side have surged into the lead with a tidal wave of goals.
It used to be the case that the relentless regularity of Liverpool’s triumphs meant neutrals wanted anyone else to prosper. Now they are the endearing underdogs, the choice of many of the unaffiliated.
It has become a title challenge for the romantics to cherish; City have played some fantasy football of their own but the question is if today’s visitors to Anfield will inject some realism into a remarkable story.
Indeed, it has come to something when the team that has scored 84 goals in 31 games is the less prolific. Or, for that matter, when the club with one league title in 46 years is seen as the established force.
At points in history, Liverpool versus City was serial winners against hapless losers. Often the sole common denominator has been a shared dislike of Manchester United. Now they have identical ambitions of lifting the league and similar modus operandi: outscoring anyone bold enough to challenge them.
This is a season when top-seven sides have received an unprecedented number of thrashings. Liverpool and City have inflicted most of them.
Liverpool have the “SAS”, Luis Suarez and Daniel Sturridge, the first Anfield strike partnership to both reach 20 league goals in a season for half a century. City have a quartet with 20 in all competitions: Alvaro Negredo, Yaya Toure, Edin Dzeko and the fit-again Sergio Aguero. It is unprecedented.
City have fine form, with five wins in six league games. Liverpool, with nine straight victories, are in even better shape.
Manuel Pellegrini’s City look to have the edge defensively, conceding only twice in seven games, but Rodgers’ side have leapfrogged Sunday’s opponents in both the league table and the scoring charts.
They lost to City, controversially, in December, when Liverpool were aggrieved that Raheem Sterling had a goal chalked off and that Suarez was denied a penalty. Yet in a season where expectations have been surpassed, even that becomes an auspicious omen.
Their previous two Boxing Day defeats to City came in 1981 and 1985. On both occasions, Liverpool rallied in the second half of the season to reclaim the league.
There have been times since then when history has seemed a burden to Liverpool, when they have been damned by comparisons with their glorious past.
Now City find themselves in a familiar position in the finishing straight. Liverpool are experiencing something that feels completely different, something so novel and fresh that it is utterly special. Five more wins and they go into orbit.
sports@thenational.ae
Follow us on twitter at The National Sport
