Come on.
It'd have been "Nice" if Pickford had dropped one in for City, or countless keepers had boobed on easy shots, or countless teams had their best players out v City, or they hadn't had De Bruyne out for half the season and other key injuries.
Well lets face it, Liverpool were/are up against a machine that not only has one of the best managers on the planet in charge, but is also funded by a very rich country that hasn't exactly been shy in spending their money over the past 10 years or so. It's a 'machine' that has shown it can churn out a points total averaging around the century mark over the past couple of seasons. So all things considered, maybe our so-called 'luck' has been something of an equalizing factor. It obviously helps us of course also having one of the best managers on the planet to combat 'The machine'. But a lot of opposition fans come across as more than just a little bit bitter & twisted when they keep up with this 'lucky' narrative when it comes to us challenging for the title.
A watershed moment for Liverpool came just over 2 years ago when Spurs thrashed us 4-1 at Wembley. From there-on-in we began to see a lot more solid defensive display as Klopp got to grips with the leaky defence we had at the time - remembering too that this was in the pre-VVD & Allison days - As a result the 80 or so Premier League games since that mauling by Tottenham has seen us lose just 4 times. All away from home & by no more than the odd goal (Swansea 0-1, United 1-2, Chelsea 0-1, & City 1-2). Now that's not luck, it's having a good manager, good players, & a really strong mentality within the squad of players. Taking away those 4 losses, the other 76 games we played resulted in 62 wins & 14 draws. Of those 62 wins we won 22 by the odd goal, & the other 40 were won by 2 goals or more. So just to give those figures some perspective I looked back on Manchester United's record over season's 2007/08 & 2008/09 & compared them to ours over the past 2 years. Now I think it's fair to say that the United side from that period was amongst the best, if not the best, Ferguson ever produced. Over the 2 season's listed above United lost a total of 9 league games, & won 23 matches by the odd goal. But more importantly, Ferguson's side were never chasing a team that looked like it could hit the 100 points mark. So the point I'm making is that there seems to be an awful lot of hyper-analysis on exactly how we obtain our points. But whilst people have been quite happy to drool over pep's City over the past couple of years, & even make the claim that the boys from The Etihad could field 2 competitive Premier League sides, the fact that they're trailing us by some distance seems to be because of other unseen, insidious, forces. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have to look too hard to find many instances from those 2 seasons where United enjoyed copious amounts of good fortune. But I imagine you'd just say it was simply down to having a good manager, good players, & a strong mentality within the squad of players.
