The Art of Winning Ugly

There’s an old cliche in football that sits amongst classics like ‘it’s a game of two halves this’ and ‘he’s good with his feet for a big guy’. Why commentators are surprised that a FOOTballer is adept with the ball at his feet is beyond me, but I digress. There’s another cliché that’s usually trotted out after title-challenging teams scrape past mid-table/relegation fodder with a scrappy 1-0 win, along the lines of ‘games like this win you the league’ and ‘got to be able to play dirty too’, and I’ve been hearing it in spades for the past day or so after Liverpool did indeed scrape past Swansea on a blistering cold Sunday afternoon at Anfield.
It took a debatable penalty for us to score our only goal of the match, and the rest of the 90 was nothing but half chances and an opportunity to bed in the returning Daniel Sturridge and Jordan Henderson – sight for sore eyes if there ever was one, huh? It wasn’t a pretty match by any stretch of the imagination, and it certainly lacked the verve and dynamism that had torn apart Manchester City and Chelsea in our previous two away games, but it was a win, a scrappy dirty just-about-there win. It was the type of win that gets you a title.

Now let’s not go nuts. Liverpool fans are widely derided as a fanbase for our wide-eyed optimism and the perennial “this is our year” mantra and to an extent, that’s true, it’s hard to accept just how hard we’ve fallen from the pantheon (or perch, thanks, Ferguson) that we used to sit upon and that ill-fated title charge of a couple of seasons ago did nothing to temper our expectations for the coming years, neither did the hiring of Jurgen Klopp. And it’s not as though a scrappy win over Swansea means we’re suddenly going to charge up the table and dismantle the bigger money boys on the way.
But. And there is a but. We’re currently sitting six points off the top of the table, having played Manchester United, Chelsea, Tottenham, Arsenal, Everton and Manchester City… all away from home. It’s a lot to ask for this year, a year in which a Top 4 position should be the primary goal and should be lauded as an achievement if it’s managed – albeit one dampened by Chelsea’s bib-littered implosion. But it’d be nice to have a go, wouldn’t it? Scrappy home wins are what champions are made of, games that you probably don’t have much right to win by the end of the 90 but you make it anyway because those 3 points mean everything, clichés be damned.

There’s a reason for these home wins coming in this style too. We’ve seen that under Jurgen Klopp we’re happy for the opposition to have the higher possession stat if it means we can rob them off the ball in their own half and launch a counter attack before they really have time to defend, and our players (particularly our static back line when it’s Sakho-less) plays right into this, it’s a rock at the back that lets our forward players jump in with less fear. But against the ‘smaller teams’ at home, the likes of Swansea, the teams who are happier to sit back and absorb pressure and attempt to hit us on the break, this same tactic just doesn’t pay the same dividend. We’re anything but clinical in front of goal at the moment and it means long swathes of passing around the box without really managing much of anything. We miss Sakho launching attacks from the back of the field, we miss Coutinho unlocking defences in a way so few players can.

If there’s a reason we don’t win the title this reason it’ll be our inability to break down the smaller teams at home, a problem that’s plagued Liverpool for as long as I can remember. There’s no point blowing away Chelsea at the Bridge if we then get dismantled by Palace at home. But we’ve got a glorious streak of fixtures now, and if we’re within 3 points off the top by the end of December then it’d be foolhardy to write us off entirely. Optimism goes a long way to rebuilding fortress Anfield and the Reds are already marching up the hill. It’s time to believe.