Hands up everyone who thought that Liverpool would be top of the Barclays Premier League at Christmas.
In truth, the Merseysiders are precariously perched: their next two games are away at Manchester City and Chelsea respectively. Lose those and they would probably be back below local rivals Everton and out of the Champions League places before the year-end. A New Year’s Day engagement back at Anfield against newly-promoted Hull then has the look of an ideal fixture with which to stop the rot – until you remember that the Tigers claimed their first-ever win over Liverpool on Humberside less than a month ago.
Top of the league, though, is what, for the moment, they are – and the Yuletide Premier League table is irradiated as a consequence with a nostalgic glow.
Other aspects of Liverpool’s resurgence have contributed to the first half of the season’s distinctly old-fashioned feel.
The revival has been a major factor in a level of unpredictability more typical of top-flight English football in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. This appeared to have been a casualty of an age that has transformed the top West European clubs into substantial businesses.
The present Liverpool is also arguably the foremost example among recent English top-tier top dogs of another quaint concept: the one-man team.
The most obvious recent reference-points against which to assess Luís Suárez’s three months of red virtuosity are the Spanish exploits of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.
It beggars belief though that Barcelona and Real Madrid would not have been in the running for silverware even without their respective Argentinian and Portuguese talismen.
For this reason, the Suárez effect we have witnessed in the final months of 2013 reminds me more of the way in which an Argentinian genius of an older vintage, Diego Maradona, more than 27 years ago lifted a pedestrian side almost single-handedly to victory in the 1986 World Cup in Mexico.
On the day last April when he bit Chelsea defender Branislav Ivanovic, you would have got short odds on Suárez being shipped out of the Premier League in disgrace for a cut-price fee, notwithstanding a seasonal tally of more than 20 goals.
Since his return from suspension in September, however, the Uruguayan has been a revelation. And more impressive even than his apparent new-found self control has been the astonishing accuracy – and potency – of his shooting.
Two seasons ago, in his first full English campaign, Suárez seemed no less inclined to attempt the spectacular than this season. The key difference is that then his conversion rate was around 10%; this season, it is three times as high.
Liverpool and Brendan Rodgers are to be congratulated then on whatever management techniques have contributed to sparking this remarkable improvement, just as they were perhaps fortunate that the Premier League’s financial dominance means that few clubs in other countries could countenance the striker’s likely wage demands, even if they could have come up with the sort of transfer fee that the Merseyside club might once have found tempting.
Maradona in 1986 was required to sustain his brilliance for only seven matches in order to win the game’s ultimate prize for his country. The Premier League lasts more than five times as long; it still seems improbable that Suárez will be able to maintain his current level of performance for long enough to carry a Liverpool squad which lacks depth in comparison to three or four rivals, to the club’s first league championship in 24 seasons.
Suárez recently signed a new contract at Anfield. Yet it is hard to believe the club will stand any chance of keeping their most precious asset beyond the end of the present season should they achieve anything less than a top-three finish.
Anything worse than that might well see Rodgers facing a summer challenge comparable to that of former Spurs boss Andrė Villas Boas this year: the challenge of selling an irreplaceable star player for a king’s ransom and spending the proceeds judiciously enough to keep the club moving in the right direction.
Having just masterminded a 5-0 demolition of Tottenham sans Gareth Bale, Rodgers, it must be assumed, has a particularly acute appreciation of just how tough such a task might be.
David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 World Cup and London 2012. Owen’s Twitter feed can be accessed at www.twitter.com/dodo938.