da casino： The great thing about football is that it’s entirely continuous. Do you remember that period of time – about five minutes ago – when your life seemed torn apart and ultimately without meaning or distraction by the ending of the football season? Poor Chelsea – they got to celebrate for all of an evening before dragging their hungover corpses back to the grind.
da brwin： Well, OK, they probably got a nice few weeks on a beach too.
But what’s wonderful for fans and horrible for the players is sometimes wonderful for the players too. This time, especially Liverpool players.
After defeat at the Britannia Stadium in May, a defeat that ranks up there with the Brazilians in Belo Horizonte in 2014 or the Italian Army in Caporetto in 1917 it’s no wonder Liverpool beat a retreat like Napoleon out of Moscow.
But what you want after a humiliating, emasculating defeat is – to borrow a phrase – to go again. And Liverpool have that unique chance – the chance to fully exorcise the demons of last season before getting stuck into the new season, with a raft of new players and a spring in their step.
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That’s the hope anyway. There’s just a word of caution.
Although Liverpool have strengthened, Stoke have strengthened too. There’s enough optimism around the Staffordshire club for ex-players to start talking about a top-four finish. Clearly there’s nothing like the heady optimism of opening weekend to put you on a high – or, you know, smoking something.
But Liverpool will still need to be careful, because this isn’t just the Stoke side that beat Liverpool 6-1 on the final day of last season, this is a Stoke side who have added some very good players in the meantime. Stoke 2.0.
But that’s not even the main reason for Liverpool to be careful on this trip. You’d still expect Liverpool to have enough firepower to beat Stoke. Even after the last time, and even with the added new faces to Mark Hughes’s side, you’d still make Liverpool favourites. But even at this early stage it’s already a big game for Liverpool.
Much has been made of the fact that Brendan Rodgers and his side will be running the gauntlet for their opening away fixtures. Thankfully the home games are very winnable – Bournemouth, West Ham, Norwich – so if Liverpool do lose a few of the tougher away games they should still claw back some points there.
But what’s important is momentum and form. For the last two seasons we’ve seen Liverpool live and die by form, when they’re good they’re very very good, but when they’re bad….
A few away defeats could dampen morale and make the home games even tougher, and Rodgers will need to make sure his team start as they mean to go on. So when you look at the tough away fixtures and you see that the most winnable away game for a while is Stoke, then you know the Stoke game is a bigger game than it might usually be.
That is, usually a draw at the Britannia is a good result, even a defeat you can chalk up to a tough away fixture. But given that the next six away fixtures are even tougher, a defeat could precipitate a bad run of form.
Now I’m not suggesting that Rodgers should be under pressure to win against Stoke, but this game is a very big game, psychologically speaking.
So we’ll see this weekend if Liverpool have exorcised the demons of May and the end of last season, if they do they can build momentum for the rest of the season – and, importantly, some good form going into some ridiculously early crunch games. If they lose, the same questions will be asked and Brendan Rodgers will be left wondering if the summer recruitment that brought in seven new signings actually helped his side to progress.
It’ll be too early to say for certain, but as far as opening day fixtures go, this is about as important as they get for Liverpool.
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