Stars’ dreams halted by coronavirus: No. 4 — Liverpool robbed of Premier League

The silence from the Premier League and English Football Association must be deafening for Liverpool fans as they anxiously await news over the future of the 2019-20 season. After 30 years of hurt it finally looked like the Anfield outfit had laid their ghosts to rest and were going to canter to the English top-flight title — picking up their first ever Premier League trophy on the way.

However, the coronavirus pandemic has put a freeze on sporting action across the globe and competitions from the NBA to the Race to Dubai have been put on ice for the foreseeable future. The big concerns for the top sporing franchises the world over is failure to complete the season — a scenario that could have serious financial implications from sponsors and television broadcasters, who have every right to withhold money should they not get the games promised.

In footballing terms, the implications could be seismic, as the top clubs across Europe depend heavily on TV rights money to fill their coffers. The is no more clear than in the Premier League, where the powers that be are doing everything they can to get a completed season and their pay cheques. In Belgium, the league organisers said they were ready to crown Bruges — the current leaders — as champions and take the standings as they are as the end-of-season. That did not go down well with Uefa, who also want a completed campaign, and they threatened leagues who award titles to teams in an incomplete season with bans from European competition.

Awarding trophies for unfinished business seems a no-go. Should we run out of time and the games cannot be competed (there are nine remaining in England’s top flight), that could leave the Premier League and FA facing the nightmare scenario of having to declare the campaign null and void (it appears that such a move could be cheaper in the long run than declaring champions for an incomplete season).

Will that will be a very costly exercise and will inevitably involve a legal case that will run and run, but it will mean so much more down Anfield way. As the league stands, Liverpool are a colossal 25 points clear of Manchester City in second — a record gap, and just before the suspension of play in March, they were mathematically one game away from winning the title, should other results have gone in their favour. That is neither here nor there now, as no return to action is visible on the horizon and the prospect of Liverpool missing out on the title in unprecedented circumstances looms ever larger in the distance.

Over the past three decades, their fans have been forced to look on as the likes of Manchester City, Chelsea, Man United, Blackburn, Arsenal and even Leicester have held the Premier League trophy aloft. Something the Reds have never done. There have been a few near misses along the way. They lost out to Manchester City by two points in 2013-14, by four to Man United in 2008-09, and were a distant second to Arsenal in 2001-02. But there was none closer than last season, when City came back from the dead to trump them on the final day, with the title race looking all but done by January.

You have to go back to 1989-90 for Liverpool’s last triumph — a nine-point success over second-placed Aston Villa — and a whole new generation of Anfield supporters have grown up since those dark days, when the Reds were a tainted bunch. They were seen as thugs and hooligans at home and abroad for their part in the Heysel disaster in 1985, which left 39 fans — mostly from Juventus — dead, and English clubs banned from European competition for five years.

The Liverpool fans are regarded as a different bunch these days, with camaraderie and fraternity seeming to lead the way in their ‘This is Different’ branding. Despite some questionable behaviour including attacking the City bus during a Champions League match, they have clung on to this ‘easy to like’ personality, and very few would begrudge them the title, were the season to be ruled over now with nine games remaining.

Yet, thanks to the murky world of lawyers and boardrooms — money talks more than silverware — Jurgen Klopp and his band of record-breaking superstars such as Mo Salah, Allison Becker, Virgil van Dijk, Sadio Mane and Roberto Firmino, may have nothing to show for their endeavours after all.