Well we immediately bounced back with a good win against Real Betis, which gives us a great chance of progressing through to the next round of a tournament that has already seen us overcome the current Spanish league leaders Barcelona.
For the remainder of the campaign, finishing in the Top 4 with a trophy already in the bag would be a really good season. If we add another trophy to that scenario then it becomes an incredible season. Heck if we add another two trophies to that scenario then it becomes an unbelievable season.
In the long term we just simply continue on our upward trajectory under the stewardship of Erik ten Hag.
In other words, we ensure that any bumps in the road along the way, don’t affect the direction that we are going in.
You have to remember that the Premier League merry-go-round of freak results can happen to anyone at anytime, including the 8 goals Manchester United scored against Arsenal, the 8 goals Middlesbrough scored against Manchester City, the 7 goals Aston Villa scored against Liverpool, and the 7 goals Liverpool scored against us.
Our freak result has happened in a campaign where we have a new manager, and the team is in a transitional phase after we finished 6th last season.
Liverpool’s freak result against Aston Villa happened in the season when they were defending their Premier League title.
Also, something that never gets mentioned is the run of 7 consecutive (back-to-back) Premier League matches against Liverpool in which they failed to score a single goal against Manchester United (January 2005 to March 2008).
During that barren run from Liverpool against us we won back-to back Premier League titles in 2007 and 2008.
If you want to go a step further, then the Premier League match against them before those 7 consecutive league blanks from Liverpool started against us, was a 2-1 win for us at Old Trafford, in which John O’Shea scored an own goal (that he later made up for at Anfield a couple of seasons later, with a stoppage time goal in a 1-0 win).
So that was actually a run of 8 consecutive (back-to-back) Premier League matches in which a Liverpool player failed to score a goal against us, over the course of 4 whole seasons (2004/05, 2005/06, 2006/07, 2007/08), and more than 12 hours of Premier League football – which in my opinion was absolutely embarrassing, even more so than a freak result in a campaign where Liverpool won’t win the league.
It’s all about perspective.
