Liverpool can show us exactly how good they are

As Liverpool prepare to face Real Madrid in the Champions League final, there remains a sense we don’t know quite how good they really are.

How good are Liverpool?

That seems a strange question to ask of a side who have broken the record for most goals in a Champions League campaign, who boast in Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mane and Roberto Firmino Europe’s most prolific front three, who are led by one of the world’s elite managers, and whose history in this competition rivals that of any team on the continent except the one they will play in the final on Saturday.

We know Liverpool are good. The question is how good. Will this year’s Champions League run mark a lasting return to the very top table of the game, or will it be, as so many cup runs are, a more fleeting kind of excellence, just the right players in just the right team at just the right moment, or series of moments? As the Reds prepare to face Real Madrid, both options seem to be true at once.

For all the talk about how vulnerable this Real side are compared to last year, they have had by far the most difficult route to the final, drawing Tottenham and Borussia Dortmund in the group stage before beating the champions of France, Italy and Germany on their way to Kiev. They have looked vulnerable at times, but their best players look as eerily confident as ever. They will be, by far, the most talented group of players Jurgen Klopp’s side have ever faced.

Liverpool, in contrast, were in a group with Sevilla, Maribor and Spartak Moscow, drew Porto in the round of 16 and, with Real and Bayern Munich looming, Roma in the semis. Of the 40 goals they’ve scored in the competition proper, 18 have come against either the second best team in Slovenia or the third best in Russia. They threw away a three-goal lead against Sevilla, nearly threw away a five-goal lead against Roma. This is the concern.

Then, of course, there is the exception: Manchester City, who at the time of the quarterfinal were favorites to win the competition, bidding for a treble, on their way to an historically dominant Premier League title, perhaps the highest realization of Pep Guardiola’s grand tactical vision since the heyday of his great Barcelona side of the late 2000s and, with the second leg at the Etihad, the worst draw the Reds could possibly get. Liverpool beat them 5-1 over two legs.

Even then, there were doubts. It wasn’t that Liverpool were better than City. Or at least the fact they were better wasn’t taken as a reflection of their superiority; it was, first and foremost, further evidence of Guardiola’s most persistent tactical failings — a tendency to over-complication in the big games, a refusal to compromise — as if Klopp was a sort of rich-man’s Tony Pulis to Guardiola’s Arsene Wenger.

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And then of course there’s Anfield. There’s nothing like a European night at Anfield, they said. Some scoffed at the idea, some preferred to focus on what was happening on the pitch, atmosphere and energy and emotion being generally much harder to account for than tactics, players, statistics. But watch the first half against City, watch the first hour against Roma. There’s nothing like a European night at Anfield.

The final, of course, will not be played at Anfield. It will be played in Kiev, in a stadium filled, despite the best efforts of both sets of fans, mostly with neutrals. And Liverpool will face neither a pushover like Maribor nor a more familiar heavyweight like Manchester City. They will face Real Madrid, winners of 12 European Cups, including the last two, the most talented, arrogant, unflappable group of players in the world.

How good are Liverpool? They’re about to show us exactly how good they are.