Time running out for Liverpool to make themselves serial winners | Liverpool

It’s the 94th minute at Estádio da Luz in October. Benfica are winning 4-0 and Atlético Madrid are in utter disarray. Zeki Amdouni runs the ball into an entirely unpatrolled Atlético area, gets a free shot from 14 yards and misses a glorious chance to make it 5-0. Nobody cares. Least of all Liverpool, even though this miss will effectively end up, five months later, knocking them out of the Champions League.

Of course, we’re in the realm of the absurd here, although when it comes to the new Champions League format this is a system with margins exactly, and absurdly, this fine. By virtue of this one goal not scored – and of course you could pick out many others – Benfica end up finishing 16th in the 36-team group phase rather than 15th: a position from which they, rather than Paris Saint-Germain, would probably have ended up facing Liverpool in the round of 16.

Naturally there were still a few bones of resentment as Liverpool made their exit on Tuesday, a certain bafflement at a format that allows a club to top the group table and still get drawn against one of the best teams in the world. Arne Slot himself lamented that Liverpool had been “so, so unlucky”. Luis Enrique’s verdict was: “Both teams deserved to go through.” And the way Uefa is going, maybe one day soon they both will.

For all this, there was also a certain magnanimity there, a recognition that Paris had been the superior team over the two legs. “The best game of football I was ever involved in,” Slot said. And of course magnanimity is much easier to come by when you are 15 points clear in the Premier League and in a cup final at the weekend. All the same, given the standard and given the stakes, it’s worth asking: just how much did this defeat mean? In an age when everything must be ranked and contextualised and GOATed, how does this failure affect the way a great Liverpool team will be remembered?

There will be some for whom this in itself is the wrong question: a forlorn attempt to devalue Liverpool’s season by measuring it against an unattainable standard, the idea that winning a 20th championship and drawing level with Manchester United is somehow insufficiently excellent. Let them eat league title!

And yet you only had to study the body language of Liverpool’s players afterwards to know that this was no ordinary defeat, no ordinary setback. Mohamed Salah, a player who may well be on his way out of Anfield this summer, was utterly inconsolable. So too Darwin Núñez, whose missed penalty was the turning point of the shootout. Strictly speaking, Liverpool didn’t need to win the Champions League this season. But you could see, in the bruised aftermath, just how good a chance they had.

The talk now will be of emotional recovery. Newcastle await at Wembley this weekend and yet, if this group of players has learned anything from the relentless campaigns of previous seasons, it is the art of dusting themselves down and picking themselves up for the next challenge. In truth, the real question is where Slot’s squad stand physically after a long, gruelling season and 210 minutes of high-intensity European football. “There’s a lot of tired legs in there,” Andrew Robertson said.

And of course there are potential implications here that go beyond this week, beyond even this season. If the 2019-20 Premier League title was the culmination of a project, then their 4-2 aggregate defeat against Atlético Madrid in that season’s Champions League – a game naturally overshadowed by the pandemic it helped to spread – also offered a slightly unflattering portrait of what was coming around the corner.

Liverpool dominated the Anfield leg of that tie, controlling long periods and yet conceding three goals through mistakes, lapses in concentration, a vulnerability to the counterattack and, ultimately, pure fatigue. And while they still won the league by 18 points, these were – by pure coincidence – the same traits that would torment them the following season, when a haunted, injury‑plagued squad finished 30 points behind their 2019-20 tally.

Obviously a certain quantum of Covid-era weirdness needs to be factored in here. But there were also tangible signs of the decay to follow. The 2019-20 squad was the eighth oldest in the Premier League and used the third fewest number of players. This season’s squad is the fourth oldest, and only Nottingham Forest have used fewer players. Cohesion, nous, experience, familiarity: these are all good traits to have, title-winning traits. But there is also the sense of a team coming towards the end of its cycle, that may need to be remade much sooner than people assume.

The last stalwarts of the first great Jürgen Klopp team are chugging towards the end. Robertson is 31, Alisson and Salah 32, Virgil van Dijk 33. Even Trent Alexander-Arnold, at 26, already has nearly 400 games under his belt, and may well end up leaving in the summer. That tension, that sense of teetering on a fraying thread, has helped these players to produce some of the finest football of their career. Perhaps this explains why Salah was so distraught afterwards: a player who knows his Champions League record is not as good as the players he aspires to emulate, and who is running out of chances to put it right.

There are contracts to sort, a summer of recruitment and disposal to plan, a title defence to be mapped out. It feels ridiculous to argue that the clock is running out for a team that hasn’t even won the league yet. But in a game moving and morphing at relentless speed, where stasis is severely punished, there is always a little less time than you think.