There has been something pleasingly old-fashioned about the Premier League title race this season. It may be a modern phenomenon that the side top of the table have lost only one of 26 games, and that the side in second have lost two, but after the years of champions habitually racking up 90 points and more, the general fallibility has been refreshing.
Liverpool are still on course for 89 points but they are not implacable, remorseless winners in the way Manchester City so often were. They reached a peak in their 2-0 home win over Real Madrid at the end of November and, although they were comfortable winners over City the following Sunday, there has been a sense since of a side, if not quite clinging on to the mountain top, then at the very least not striding quite so confidently along the ridge.
They have won only half of their past 14 games, although that is a statistic that requires contextualisation given it includes three defeats of limited relevance (the first leg of a Carabao semi they went on to win, a Champions League dead rubber and the FA Cup exit with a much-changed side).
Related: Slot criticises Núñez for dropping work rate after horror Liverpool miss at Villa
Yet while the significance of those games can be downplayed, it is also true that Liverpool are stuttering in the league. They didn’t play particularly well at Bournemouth, when even Slot said they had been a little fortunate. Their past two away games have been uproarious 2-2 draws, far removed from the understated calm of many of Liverpool’s wins earlier in the season. Slot himself, previously so assured, lost his cool at Everton, and Darwin Núñez’s miss at Aston Villa could end up as the equivalent of Kevin Keegan’s “I would love it” rant; the symbolic moment at which the title was lost. But perhaps the greatest concern of all was Liverpool’s second half against Wolves last weekend, tying up and failing to register a shot against the team currently 17th in the league.
Slot appears unconcerned, pointing out that titles are rarely won without blips here and there. Which is true. It’s only recently that the financial stratification of football has made relentless excellence possible. Traditionally, almost all champions have had their off days, the games that just have to be plodded through and endured, the points salvaged from a scrap. Drawing tricky away games never used to be a problem.
The question, then, is twofold. There is the short-term problem of whether Liverpool can hold on – and an eight-point lead is extremely healthy, even having played a game more, particularly given Arsenal, their only realistic challenger, have lost their forward line to hamstring injuries. And then there is the longer-term question of whether this sense of comparative uncertainty is a permanent state or a one-season blip.
Certainly it’s hard at this stage ever to see City returning to the levels of dominance they once enjoyed. That’s not to say they might not win the Premier League again but once an aura has gone, it’s very hard to retrieve. Quite aside from the various problems with injury and ageing players and the failure of recruitment that led them to sign four players in January, what was striking on Wednesday was their passivity in losing to Real Madrid, the acquiescence in defeat. They still have the players to hammer a soft-pedalling Newcastle but belief has gone.
Perhaps that is a corollary of the oft-noted habit of Pep Guardiola sides to concede goals in clutches. The mechanism is supremely sophisticated, perhaps better honed than any coach has made their teams before, but that requires players to sublimate themselves to the system and that means when the mechanism glitches, there is an absence of personal fight, of initiative, of the capacity to grab a game and drag it back. Guardiola’s instructions are detailed, often exhausting, and at times counterintuitive; if poor results lead to a loss of faith in him, are players as prepared to execute his meticulous game plans with quite the same rigour?
It is possible Guardiola’s gifts themselves are waning. In a profession in which few manage a decade at the highest level, he is in his 16th season of perpetual evolution, trying to stay ahead of rivals who are constantly analysing his work, replicating or forging counter-strategies. Certainly in neither of the games against Madrid was there any sense of a viable plan to combat the axis of Vinícius Júnior and Kylian Mbappé. Even if Josko Gvardiol can contain Mohamed Salah on Sunday, who can operate at right-back against Cody Gakpo or Luis Díaz?
In part, City’s decline is the result of exhaustion, which feels like a defining feature of this season. Players and their union have protested about the schedule, the constant bloating of tournaments and invention of new ones, which, combined with the intensity of the modern game, has understandably led to fatigue.
Related: Premier League: 10 things to look out for this weekend
That may be the biggest factor explaining the dynamic of this season: weariness will always lead to greater inconsistency. Although Liverpool have been less afflicted by injury than many, tiredness was clearly on show in the second half against Wolves; it may not quite be like one of Leeds’s collapses under Don Revie, but anxiety plus fatigue can do strange things.
Last time there was a season in which the Premier League’s middle class punched so hard was 2015-16; the grandees responded with a reset and vast spending. Profitability and sustainability rules may make that impossible now; it may be that this slightly more competitive age is here to stay. It may be that, in as far as such things can be discerned, that means a slightly lower quality at the top end, but equally there is arguably more fun in the raggedness and unpredictability.
For several seasons, Manchester City against Liverpool was the obvious marquee fixture of the season, a contest between the two sides who had set new standards. On Sunday, though, while it may be champions against likely successors, their meeting seems also to represent something else: not only the fading of one great force and the unsteady emergence of another, but the passing from an era in which the best teams were crushingly dominant to one in which a welcome unconvincingness reigns.
