Taste of Europe after a testing time

Football

Only when the second goal came could the home crowd at Anfield finally, guardedly allow itself to breathe. The atmosphere had been taut until that moment, close to an hour into the match — Liverpool’s Premier League finale against Middlesbrough.

It had been that way for weeks, for months. A thick tension had coiled around Liverpool, fraying the nerves of their players, darkening the minds of their fans. It had started to feel like a club fixated on, even resigned to, the worst possible case.

It had lifted a little — but only a little — when Georginio Wijnaldum, on the stroke of halftime, gave Liverpool the lead. Manchester City was winning, handsomely; Arsenal was winning, too. The margin was still too fine, catastrophe still too close.

But then Philippe Coutinho, Liverpool’s crown jewel, provided the second goal, and at last the stress headache lifted. The sense that — in the words of Jurgen Klopp, the Liverpool manager — it would all “slip through the fingers” started to evaporate.

For the first time in a long while, Liverpool started to enjoy itself — not out of euphoria, but out of relief. Adam Lallana added a goal, a dab of gloss, for the 3-0 final score, and the fans did what they could to create the end-of-school atmosphere traditionally associated with the season’s final day.

They cycled through songs of praise for alumni long departed; they encouraged Lucas Leiva, the workaday Brazilian midfielder who is likely to leave the club this summer after a decade’s service, to shoot, from a variety of unlikely locations.

Most fittingly, with tens of thousands of scarves twirling in the air, they gave an airing to “Oh Campione,” which provided the soundtrack to the club’s adventures in the Champions League more than a decade ago. It was as if it was being dusted off and tuned up, ready for next season.

It will, after all, be required. This victory ensured Liverpool, which edged Arsenal by a single point to finish among the top four in the Premier League, a place in the Champions League’s final qualifying round next season. The finest of margins led to the most divergent of prospects: Liverpool can dream about taking its place among Europe’s elite for just the second time since 2009, while Arsenal must contemplate a summer of rancour and regret.

That qualifying round should not be overlooked, but Liverpool can still feel pride in meeting its target for the season. There remains a scintilla of disappointment, of course: There was a point, at the turn of the year, when it seemed that Liverpool was destined for more, that they might challenge Chelsea for the Premier League title.

But that should not distract from the fact that Liverpool’s ambition in August, when the season began, was to finish in the top four, to qualify for the Champions League. It has done so amid the most intense competition: It is unheard of for a team to miss out on the 75 points Arsenal gathered.

Nor, though, should Liverpool’s finish be taken as the end of a journey.

If the denouement to this Premier League campaign has proved anything, it is that a sort of presenteeism is rotting away the competition’s fabled unpredictability. Everton finished seventh, 15 points ahead of Southampton, in the eighth. Southampton, on the other hand, accrued just 6 more points than Watford, which finished 17th. Just a year after Leicester took its first title, stunning the league, the gap between the elite and the rest is wider than ever.

That generated, during the last few weeks, dozens of games in which teams were simply counting down the days until summer vacation. Arsène Wenger, the Arsenal manager, might have had an ulterior motive for criticising West Ham’s apparent apathy against Liverpool last week, but that does not mean he did not have a point.

That same presenteeism, though, increasingly applies to English teams in the Champions League. Too many are so fixated on being in it — the Arsenal effect, it might be called — that they seem to forget that the general idea is to make an impact. For them just being there is enough: It is not the winning, it is the taking part.

To some extent, that is a consequence of the all-encompassing self-importance of the Premier League. For both emotional and financial reasons, domestic competition eclipses everything else. But it serves, too, to erode the advantage conferred by being in the Champions League.

No Premier League club needs the money on offer in Europe’s most exclusive competition; it is, instead, a matter of prestige. Being in the Champions League, received wisdom has it, means access to a higher calibre of player when trying to strengthen a squad.

That, though, is not quite true. What elite players want is a team that is not only regularly in the Champions League, but one that can also go deep into it, into the semifinals and finals. Liverpool will not be able to compete with Real Madrid or Barcelona in the transfer market until it has proved it can also compete with them on the field.

Klopp, to his credit, understands that. “Liverpool needs to be there consistently, all the time,” he said. “We have to make steps for us to be around the best teams in the world because we are at one of the best clubs in the world.”

He had met his target for the season, but there was no triumphalist note in his voice. This was a moment in Liverpool’s “development,” he said, a springboard to something else, a beginning, not an end. It was a moment to breathe, yes, but only to gather oxygen for the greater challenges to come.