In the true spirit of TTT (see Paul’s note under his recent articles), the last couple of weeks have been a bit rough health-wise, and while I’ve got two pieces half finished on This Red Planet I just haven’t had the energy to do the final bits of research and data analysis to finish them; so either this weekend or early next week for the next original article, but to tide you over - and in the context of the current Liverpool side just bubbling away - here’s one of Paul’s finest chapters from the book this substack is named after! (Daniel)
Moonshot
“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
John F Kennedy, 1962
“I choose to stay in my bedroom.”
BigDickLolz69, 2022
Liverpool never set out to win the quadruple. No one does. Just as no one sets out to win all 38 league games, or run around the world non-stop, without refreshments. Some things have never been done, and for good reason. A team just tries to win each game at a time, as managers will say; even if they have to plan further ahead (maybe two or three games, maybe more in a less direct way), and manage a busy schedule and which players will be in the red-zone for injuries. Then, once the ‘potential’ tag – treble, quadruple, unbeatables – sticks, and that team understandably falls a little short, it becomes a way to call an outstanding achievement a failure.
Prior to the 2022 FA Cup final, Klopp told the press: “If we are all only happy when we are really winning when your race finishes what life would that be? When I say ‘Enjoy the journey’ I mean it.
“We only cause ourselves problems as human beings. For example: ‘Don’t come home without a Quadruple’ – you will never be happy. If that is the only way to satisfy you, then that is really difficult.
“[But] let’s give it a go. Football games are sometimes decided by single players, most of the time they are decided by the whole performance and we can work on the whole performance and have world-class players – and we will have world-class players.
“It is not what other teams are doing and it’s like ‘Gah, they signed him’. I never thought that to be honest. When they took a player from me and put him there, in Germany quite frequently, it gives them 20 per cent and us minus 20 and that’s not cool. But as long as they don’t pick from us I’m fine.
“It has never been done before [the Quadruple] so it’s like the first step in whichever island, we’re the first team to give it a try and that’s what we do.
“If you had said at the end of the season you will be in all finals and two match-days before the end we are three points behind City, I’d have said ‘nah, I can’t see that happening’. Not all together in the same season.
“But the boys did it and that’s really special, but we know the decisive part is coming now. You can see it – warming up is finished. Now we have rhythm finally, now we can go for it.”
The four-trophy sweep didn’t come to pass, but boy, how close.
“I could have gone to Bayern [Munich] a few times,” Klopp also said, prior to the victory over Chelsea. “I could have won more titles in my life. I would say there is a good chance at least of that. I didn’t do it. I had a contract here and I never did it. That’s completely fine.
“The world is not full of winners, the world is full of triers hopefully. And I try and, sometimes, I win with some other people together. I am happy with that.”
NASA
That the quadruple was even possible related to a dozen years’ work, from the point FSG (then NESV) bought Liverpool in late 2010, and a project started to be shaped, in essence, once Michael Edwards was brought to the club in 2011, along with Ian Graham, by Damien Comolli. Mistakes morphed into moonshots.
It was Edwards and Graham who helped bring in the best players in those early years, and who confirmed that Jürgen Klopp should be the manager to be approached in 2015. John W Henry handed over control to a more football-astute partner in Mike Gordon, and he became FSG’s go-to man; the one who went out and procured the German, after Manchester United had failed, a year earlier, with a cringeworthy pitch to the Borussia Dortmund manager.
Few successes occur overnight. We often only see the fruits of ten years of striving, when someone hits the big-time. We don’t see the striving itself.
NASA going to the moon took a decade-or-so, in addition to all the technological work that had taken place up until 1961, including taking German rocket expertise honed in the 1940s via the horrors of war. From 1961, dozens of unmanned and then manned missions built up the experience necessary to make that final tiny step for mankind. Progress was made, incrementally. Rockets exploded along the way, and astronauts died.
A few brief examples, via a list of the programme’s launches, is worth quickly summarising, to show the iterations.
Saturn I, October 27, 1961. Test of Saturn I first stage S-I; “dummy upper stages carried water”.
QTV Little Joe II, August 28, 1963. Little Joe II qualification test – the “launch escape system”.
Saturn I, September 18, 1964. “Carried first programmable-in-flight computer on the Saturn I vehicle; last launch vehicle development flight”
Saturn IB. August 25, 1966. “Suborbital flight to Pacific Ocean splashdown. CM heat shield tested to higher speed; successful SM firings.”
Apollo 1. February 21, 1967. Saturn IB. “Never launched. On January 27, 1967, a fire in the command module during a launch pad test killed the crew and destroyed the module. This flight was originally designated AS-204, and was renamed to Apollo 1 at the request of the crew’s families.”
Apollo 4. November 9, 1967. “First flight of Saturn V rocket; successfully demonstrated S-IVB third stage restart and tested CM heat shield at lunar re-entry speeds.”
Apollo 9. March 3, 1969. “First crewed flight test of Lunar Module; tested propulsion, rendezvous and docking in Earth orbit. EVA tested the Portable Life Support System (PLSS).”
Apollo 10. May 18, 1969. “‘Dress rehearsal’ for lunar landing. The LM descended to 8.4 nautical miles (15.6 km) from lunar surface.”
Apollo 11. July 16, 1969. “First crewed landing in Sea of Tranquility (Tranquility Base) including a single surface EVA.”
In between: various other test flights, going further, or trying something different. Several further astronauts died.
None of these things were easy. None could be achieved overnight. And none could be done without a huge amount of teamwork. NASA estimates that nearly half a million men and women across the United States were involved in the Apollo programme. It was about the least-easy thing humankind had ever done (unless you’re a crazy conspiracy theorist who thinks it was filmed by half a dozen people in a Hollywood basement; or a crazy activist who thinks it a shameful example of the evils of colonialism, presumably displacing all the indigenous Clangers in the process).
I mention all of this, as it feels like Liverpool have spent their past dozen years on various missions, all barely possible, but some inexplicably achieved. To win the quadruple, however, would have been like the Apollo mission, back in 1969, boosting from the moon, orbiting Mars, slingshotting Saturn, and depositing a kidnapped President Nixon into the gaseous hellscape of Jupiter, where he probably belonged.
The whole Liverpool/Klopp project looked in jeopardy at various points between March 2020 and March 2021, when football was mothballed due to Covid on the brink of title success, over £100m was lost due to empty stadia and television deal repayments, and then the team, replete with a few ageing players, appeared to be on its knees due to a run of injuries and illnesses. It felt nearly broken. That Liverpool were able to ‘go again’ from March 2021 onwards, to the degree they did, was itself a minor – maybe even a major – miracle.
Before getting onto the actual football that gave so much joy, it’s important to establish the context of what was achieved.
Richer Rivals
In the dozen years since Liverpool Football Club gained new owners (from the brink of bankruptcy), Chelsea continued to spend big, and Manchester City further skewed the difficulty levels.