Chelsea end six-game losing streak as Anfield boos its faded champions

From the moment the board went up, it did not take a clairvoyant to know what the reaction would be . A little more than an hour had passed. Liverpool and Chelsea were locked in what was not so much a stalemate as an existential crisis, aired live on a Saturday lunchtime. Arne Slot was sending on the most expensive player in British history.

That was not the problem. The problem was that in order to do so, he was removing Rio Ngumoha, Liverpool’s teenage winger, the one player in this husk of a team that seems broadly aware that the general idea is to get the ball as close to the opposition’s goal as possible. Anfield did not know, then, that Ngumoha had cramp, and could not continue. All it saw was a substitution that smacked of caution. Loudly, the crowd let Slot know it did not approve.

Much of the sonic backdrop to another 90 minutes of flaccid, tentative football from a side that can – for the next week or so – be described as the reigning champions of England was no less predictable. The groans of frustration at Liverpool’s passivity. The howls of derision at their sluggish, plodding style. The thunderous boos that greeted the end of another wasted afternoon.

There was, admittedly, one surprise: when Bobby Madley, the fourth official, indicated that there would be seven minutes of injury time, Anfield roared. The only explanation for this is muscle memory, a sort of Pavlovian response. Nobody, inside the stadium or watching on television, could possibly have wanted this to last any longer than necessary.

There are, traditionally, two types of late-season games. One is chaotic, wild, perhaps a little silly: teams with little at stake playing with a freedom and a lightheartedness that is absent in the winter. The second is, well, this: basically an administrative exercise, played so that a score can be recorded, appearance bonuses handed out and Fantasy Football points accrued.

That, certainly, was how it felt Anfield: two beleaguered teams who want nothing more than this miserable league season to be over as quickly as possible, going through their contractually-obligated motions, ticking one of the three remaining boxes that they must before they can get on with forgetting all about it.

It is one of those curiosities of football that unhappiness is not always proportional to achievement. By most measures, the scale of Chelsea’s discontent should be greater than Liverpool’s.

The former, after all, are on their fourth manager of the season (albeit in the guise of the same man who was their second.) They started and finished this game ninth in the table. Unless Aston Villa do them a very specific set of favours, they will miss out on the Champions League for a third time in four seasons. Their owners have proved, fairly consistently, that they are not very good at running a football club, enforcing a recruitment model that according to all available evidence does not work. 

And yet, at the end, Chelsea’s fans were happily singing about their forthcoming trip to Wembley, evidently content not to have lost for the first time in a month. Liverpool might currently be five places above them; thanks more to the warped economics of the modern game than their own merit, they are highly likely to be in the Champions League yet again next year. As the boos suggested, their crisis feels both more pointed and more urgent.

That might, perhaps, be because it has been more sudden, a precipitous plunge for a club that this time last year was apparently in a position to construct a dynasty. Or it might be because it is inordinately more complex. There is an obvious solution to Chelsea’s shortcomings: the club’s owners could accept that their policy of constant churn is disruptive in the traditional, rather than the Silicon Valley, definition of the word.

Liverpool, tasked with drawing the curtain on the most successful era of their modern history while dealing with the birthing pains of another, are in a much more delicate, much more awkward position. Liverpool are caught in a twilight; it makes it hard for anyone to see where the club is going.

Mohamed Salah and Andy Robertson are leaving; there remains a chance that Alisson Becker, by all accounts not averse to the prospect of joining Juventus, will go with them. Curtis Jones, too, has yet to sign a new contract; Ibrahima Konaté can still leave for free, in theory, next month. More significantly: Michael Edwards, the off-screen architect of much of the last decade at Anfield, and Richard Hughes, his appointment as director of football, are both out of contract next year; neither, at this stage, feels like a long-term fixture. 

And then, of course, there is Slot. The Dutchman’s public persona has become a little spikier, a little less composed, over the course of this season; the apparently imperturbable calm that defined his first season has long since broken. He, clearly, expects to be in place next year; he spoke, after the game, of his confidence that next season “will be different, in terms of results, in terms of how things look, if we can have the summer we are planning to have.”

As things stand, that would appear to be the club’s plan, too; the question is whether it stands up to reality. Slot is smart enough not to try to argue with the fans, to critique their responses, to suggest – as he must surely feel – that the man who delivered the league title at the first attempt should perhaps be afforded more time.

He is certainly not likely to mention that, after a season in which his position has been under scrutiny for months and many fans have decided he is a roadblock to the club’s success, Liverpool could still finish fourth in the Premier League, which isn’t really very much of a crisis at all. One glimpse at Chelsea should tell you that.

But then he knows, as we all do, that is not how this works. The boos and the groans and the howls at Anfield were not instinctive, surprising. They were predictable and they were loud. And the echo of boos like that tends not to fade away.

Photography by Darren Walsh/Getty