A Brazilian journalist and pundit has claimed that the current stoppage of English football due to the coronavirus pandemic could ultimately work out in Liverpool’s favour.
The Reds’ seemingly unstoppable march towards a first league title in 30 years was halted after the Premier League shut down due to the outbreak of COVID-19 throughout the UK, with Sky Sports reporting that key stakeholders would not resume the season until it is “safe and appropriate to do so”.
UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin even warned that, if major European leagues could not resume before the end of June, their respective seasons may have to be declared null and void without a champion being crowned (as per La Reppublica, via Daily Mail), an outcome which would be incredibly galling for Liverpool.
However, speaking on UOL’s Posse de Bola podcast, former ESPN pundit Juca Kfouri believes that the halting of the season may have come at a good time for Jurgen Klopp’s team given their downturn in form leading up to it. He said: “What I find very curious about all of this, which is not our topic, but it’s worth noting, is that another guy who got along very well with this stoppage, as incredible as it may seem, was Klopp, because Liverpool were coming down the slope and now he will come back with everything the same.”
Kfouri also ridiculed the thought of the season being voided without a league title for Liverpool, saying: “In England, if they make up to cancel the league and don’t give the title to Liverpool, for God’s sake. Don’t come up with ‘why is it like that there, not here?’ There you have no doubt about who’s the best team of the season. If you take that title from Liverpool, England really loses much of the respect I have for it, for the Queen and Churchill. That’s crazy.”
Kfouri’s intriguing claim about the stoppage potentially benefitting Liverpool in the long run is a logical one. As he had pointed out, the Reds had fallen into a slump prior to the season being stopped, having lost four of their previous six games and crashed out of the FA Cup and Champions League as well as losing their unbeaten status in the Premier League. Prior to that run, they had only been beaten twice in all competitions inside 90 minutes in the current campaign – and one of those came when a youthful Reds side were eliminated from the Carabao Cup by a vastly more expeienced Aston Villa team.
Indeed, the mid-season break in early February probably had the opposite effect for Liverpool, who had enjoyed an exceptional winter in which they put together a run of 16 wins in 18 games in all competitions, recorded the bulk of an 18-match winning sequence in the Premier League and went seven league matches without conceding a single goal (as per TransferMarkt). Ironically, Klopp was one of the managers who had advocated that break, adhering to it so rigidly that he refused to countenance playing any of his senior squad for the FA Cup replay against Shrewsbury which fell during that two-week period.
Just as that February break halted Liverpool’s previously irrepressible gallop, the current stoppage of the football season could enable them to take stock and rediscover their best form following the slump they endured over the last six weeks, as Kfouri has suggested.
Liverpool fans, what did you make of Kfouri’s claims about the stoppage of the season potentially benefitting the Reds considering their poor form beforehand? Share your views in the comments section below!
