Anfield in May smells of cut grass and diesel from the Anfield Road. The flags are out already. Four days before the match, someone had tied a red scarf to the railings on Walton Breck Road, the way they do when a season reaches the kind of week that writes itself into the programme notes of future seasons. Liverpool v Chelsea, Saturday 9 May, 12:30 BST. Kick-off in four days.T1, Premier League
Liverpool need six points from their last three games. Simple arithmetic. Less simple is the form of the team arriving.
Enzo Maresca’s Chelsea have lost once in eleven. Cole Palmer has scored in each of his last four away fixtures. Marc Cucurella, whom nobody wanted eighteen months ago, has been the most consistent left back in the division since Christmas. This is not the Chelsea that Anfield remembers from September, which is precisely the problem. The side that was, by November, eight points off the pace and managed by a man still learning the English game’s rhythms has become, by May, the fixture that nobody in the top three wanted.
Arne Slot knows this. He will have studied the reverse fixture at Stamford Bridge, the 1-1 draw in which Chelsea controlled the second half and Liverpool’s press lost its shape after the hour. He will have noted how Palmer drifted into the right half-space and pulled Virgil van Dijk into positions the centre-back does not prefer. He will know that Maresca’s midfield, in its current iteration, is more patient than it was in autumn, that Moisés Caicedo has stopped trying to break lines with every pass and learned, instead, to recycle.
None of this will trouble Slot publicly. His press conferences have followed the same cadence since August: the next game is the only game. He has said it so many times that the words have lost their texture. But the dressing room will know. Trent Alexander-Arnold will know, because his future is the other story that sits beneath every Anfield matchday now, the one nobody writes above the fold but everybody reads between the lines. Mohamed Salah will know, because Salah has scored twenty-six league goals and wants twenty-eight and the record that goes with it, and because the Egyptian does not separate personal milestones from collective ones, which is, perhaps, why he is the player he is.
Liverpool’s title charge has not been a charge. It has been a grind. Seventeen wins and two draws since the turn of the year, but the draws were at Brentford and at home to Fulham, and both felt like points dropped rather than points taken. Slot’s system, the inverted fullback, the high defensive line, the way Curtis Jones is asked to carry the ball through the centre rather than around it, has been the story of the season. The numbers support it. But numbers do not feel the silence of a crowd that has just watched an equaliser go in during added time, and numbers did not feel Anfield in the eighty-ninth minute against Fulham, when the ground held its breath and then exhaled, slowly, the way a room does when someone drops a glass.
The concern, the one that sits beneath the arithmetic, is whether Liverpool have the composure for a match like this. Slot’s side have been superb in the middle weeks, the Tuesday-night-and-Saturday-afternoon runs, the matches that fill the calendar and disappear from memory. They have been less convincing in the ones that do not disappear. The FA Cup semi-final loss to Manchester City in April, when Liverpool led twice and conceded in the hundred-and-sixteenth minute, told you something about what happens when this team is forced to manage a game rather than win one. The Champions League exit to Real Madrid, on aggregate, after a first leg in which Liverpool were the better side for seventy-five minutes and the worse side for the rest, told you something else.
These are the margins Slot operates within. His football is structured, intelligent, and, in its best moments, a pleasure to watch. It is also a football that assumes control. When that control slips, as it did in the second leg at the Bernabéu, there is no obvious Plan B, and the players on the pitch looked, for fifteen minutes, like men who had lost the instruction manual.
Chelsea, by contrast, arrive with nothing to lose and a manager who has spent the season proving that he understands English football better than the consensus expected. Maresca’s substitutions have been sharp. His use of Palmer, initially too rigid, too tethered to the right, has become more fluid; Palmer now roams, and the players around him adjust. Nicolas Jackson, wasteful in front of goal through winter, has scored five in his last six. The spine of this Chelsea side, Caicedo, Levi Colwill, Robert Sánchez, is young enough to forget that Anfield is supposed to be daunting, which is either an advantage or a miscalculation, and the match will decide which.
Slot, for his part, will pick his strongest eleven. Alisson in goal. Alexander-Arnold on the right, unless the ankle he tweaked against Newcastle has not settled. Van Dijk and Ibrahima Konaté in the centre. Andrew Robertson on the left. Ryan Gravenberch anchoring. Jones and Alexis Mac Allister ahead of him. Salah wide right. Luis Díaz wide left. Darwin Núñez through the middle, because Núñez, for all the chances he misses, is the striker who terrifies defences with his movement, and against Colwill and Wesley Fofana, movement matters.
The tactical question is whether Liverpool press high from the start or manage the first fifteen minutes conservatively and trust their fitness to tell after the hour. Slot has favoured the former all season. He may, given the stakes, choose the latter. It would be unlike him. But unlike him is what this match might require.
Anfield will be full. The Kop will sing before kick-off, the way it always does, and the players in the tunnel will hear it and feel it in the way that players feel these things, which is not the way fans feel them but is not nothing, either. This is the kind of match that, in twenty years, people will claim to have been at, and some of them will be telling the truth.
Six points from three games. The arithmetic is simple. The football will not be.
