When in 20 or 30 years Liverpool fans settle down to revel in the great side that ended the 30-year drought, it’s probably not this game they’ll be watching. The 19th league title, the first since 1990, will come and there may yet be further wonders to garnish the final weeks of the season, but the derby was not a game to dispel fears that what should be one of the most glorious seasons in the team’s history will end in anticlimax.
The ceiling that’s almost painted when the gloss runs out. The anecdote that’s almost told when the waiter arrives to take the order. The run that’s half-complete when you bump into a colleague. The poem dreamt up in an opium-induced sleep that’s part-transcribed when the visitor from Porlock turns up. Everybody has had a project they’ve almost finished and then been interrupted. Some are able to return to it with renewed vigour, others muddle to a conclusion, some let it slide altogether. Liverpool seem to have taken up the brush with a sense of dutiful weariness.
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