Sadness and elation for Liverpool fans as they win title in pandemic
There will be no open-topped bus working its way through supporter-lined streets because the COVID-19 outbreak is still with us.
Friday 26 June 2020 06:01, UK
You wait 30 years for another top flight title and when it does come along, it's in the middle of a worldwide pandemic, eventually sealed by another team playing in an almost empty stadium 220 miles away.
The circumstances of this title victory are utterly bizarre but should not detract from the achievement, because anyone sensible knows the trophy belonged to Liverpool long before lockdown.
No ifs, no buts, no asterisks. This is one of the greatest teams the Premier League has seen - if not the single greatest.
Its supporters have spent the last three decades imagining the feeling of lining the streets in the hundreds of thousands, their heroes parading by on an open-top bus, through the city centre and past the Liver Building, skirting the banks of the River Mersey, domestic champions once more.
Coronavirus means that is impossible, however. Official celebrations will be muted but it does not dull the sense of pride felt in the red half of Liverpool, where many were not alive when the Reds won the old first division in 1990.
Waitress Amy Douglas, 28, from Formby, is one of them. As a season ticket holder, she is consumed by mixed feelings.
"I keep bursting out crying," she says, "I'm excited, I'm completely delighted. But it is heart breaking, too, watching the games on TV with all that fake crowd noise. It's that feeling of 'I should be there'. But hopefully we can do it again next year without COVID-19."
To understand what this title means, you have to be in Liverpool, to feel how football pulses through the city, both binding and dividing it.
I got a taxi from the train station a few months ago and the female driver, a part-time beautician, needed no prompting, "Jurgen Klopp," she said "we just love him, he's one of us now. The men want to be him and the women want to sleep with him."
The 53-year-old from Stuttgart, with the magnetic charm and high-resolution smile, arrived in Merseyside four years ago as the hottest property in football management and has more than justified the billing.
He has made smart purchases - notably in Mohammed Salah and Sadio Mane, two of Liverpool's brightest stars - but he has also invested time in the academy, demonstrating a much heralded adeptness for recognising and nurturing young talent.
Trent Alexander-Arnold grew up five minutes' drive from Liverpool's Melwood training ground. He turned 17 one day before Klopp took over and is now a mainstay of the team, his perfectly placed free kicks earning warranted comparisons with David Beckham.
The area immediately around Liverpool's Anfield stadium, with its back-to-back red and yellow brick terraced housing, is undergoing regeneration but remains one of the ten most deprived neighbourhoods in England.
Here, football offers an escape from the often harsh realities of everyday life and residents delight in Alexander-Arnold. He is a genuine homegrown success story - an increasingly rare commodity in football.
On the wall of one of the end terraces is a three-storey mural of the right-back, who has proven himself to be not just one of English football's most prized youngsters but also an ambassador for the local community, volunteering for charities that deliver food parcels in his spare time.
The young star, who is mixed race, has also been an outspoken advocate of ending discrimination in football and society, saying the situation has been "too wrong for too long" - a frankness encouraged by his manager.
Comparisons will naturally be made with the last Liverpool team to triumph in the top division, back in April 1990, with two games to spare.
Of the current squad, only four - James Milner, Adrian, Dejan Lovren and Adam Lallana - were alive at that time.
Liverpool have won the Champions League twice and three FA Cups in the intervening period but the long wait for this one makes it the sweetest of all.
In 2014, Liverpool's charge towards the title was derailed by a now infamous slip by then-captain Steven Gerard, who is still haunted by the moment.
One man who knows what it feels like to win a title with Liverpool is John Barnes, a key part of the team which won in 1990, led by Kenny Dalglish.
"This one will be slightly different," Barnes says, "because it's been 30 years. In 1990 we'd won it two years earlier. I'm not saying we were blasé about it, or complacent.
"But what you learned is that the way you treated success should be similar to the way we treat failure - in that you go into every game with authenticity and determination. If you win, you win, and if you lose you lose, which is what Jurgen Klopp has brought back to this club."
Just metres away from Anfield is another sign of the changing times, a Black Lives Matter mural with "Merseyside Together" written above it.
They may be united in fighting discrimination but where the more trivial matter of football is concerned, the city remains split in two; red or blue; Liverpool or Everton.
Nobody knows that better than Dave Prentice, an Everton fan and journalist for the Liverpool Echo who has covered both teams for the last 30 years.
"It's a way of life in Liverpool, you're blue or your red, that's all anyone wants to talk about," he says.
"You jump in a cab, it's the only conversation. In the pub, football's all anyone wants to talk about. Gerard Houlier (former Liverpool manager) spoke about it when he signed Nicky Barmby from Everton and he couldn't quite believe the furore it created. It was as if he had changed his religion, but in many it was, because he changed sides."
The entire city, to its great credit, continues to stand united on the Hillsborough disaster which claimed 96 lives in April 1989. "There is that civic pride and togetherness, most notably around Hillsborough," says Prentice. "Liverpool had that famous banner 'LFC thanks EFC' so it's a strange city in many ways but it's also a close one."
The Liverpool motto in recent years has been "This Means More" - a sentiment often pushed by the marketing department and bought into by the supporter base, which understandably irks rival fans.
But given the weight of feeling, the history and the 30-year wait, maybe, just maybe, it does.