Liverpool are 'back in 2017' – Enjoy the Development of a New Team, with Inconsistency a Given

We need to make sensible comparisons

If there's one thing I think most Liverpool fans are missing, it's that we're now essentially back in 2017 (when fools were doubting Jürgen Klopp) or, perhaps a little more encouragingly, early 2018.

Where we're not, clearly, is in 2019, 2020 or even 2022.

Anything that takes time to build – and is worthwhile – goes through countless iterations, refinements, adjustments.

Unless quick instinctive sketches, great artworks are usually honed and honed and honed.

(I'm not saying it'll be a great work of art by any means, but I'm now eight years into writing my second novel and, with it more-or-less complete, each re-write has made it better, with hopefully the final edit this summer. Just as, long before becoming a professional writer, I started by writing the occasional good sentence 30 years ago, then the occasional good paragraph, then the occasional good longer-form piece or chapter; not always quite knowing how or why some things were good and other things were rubbish, until after years of constant practice, a lot of which the world thankfully didn't get to see, I got to a level where I could make a living, and sell a decent amount of football books and also my first novel, which received a Kirkus Star.)

A great football team is far more complex in many ways, as it involves 'moving' parts.

Moving human parts. Moving human parts whose moods and forms and fitnesses change. (And human moving parts that other human moving parts seek to nullify.)

Inconsistency precedes greatness, as I noted earlier in the week, as things take a long time to perfect.

This is the stage where the team has been taken half apart (by time, by injuries, by design) and is being rebuilt.

In this in-depth ZenDen piece I'll show how similar things are to the 2017 - 2018 period in many ways, and that it's wrong to expect Liverpool to go through a transition that has no awkward moments, growing pains or clear periods of inconsistency.

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