It was, it has to be acknowledged, a much-changed Liverpool lineup. Of the 11 players who began Sunday’s FA Cup fourth-round match at Plymouth Argyle, only Luis Díaz had made more than 10 league starts this season and only three others had made more than five. Even allowing for that, Plymouth’s victory registers as one of the great shocks of recent times, only the fourth time the leader of the Premier League has ever gone out of the competition to lower-division opposition.
As their quietly charismatic 42-year-old Bosnian coach Miron Muslić pointed out afterward, it was a day that will go down in Plymouth’s history, that will be recalled for generations, as a one-off result more impressive than anything they achieved in reaching the semi-final in 1983-84. It was Liverpool’s ninth defeat to lower-league opposition this century but, in terms of the scale of the shock, it felt perhaps most akin to their exit against non-league Worcester City in 1959 when they were a second-flight club, a defeat that precipitated the decline that led to Phil Taylor making way for the great Bill Shankly.
Liverpool, in fact, tend to come out of embarrassments well. It was their shock exit to Watford in 1970 that convinced Shankly to start afresh and rebuild, winning the league three years later and laying the foundations for their subsequent domination. Even when they lost to Burnley in 2005 (when Rafa Benítez admitted he underestimated the threat Championship sides could pose; Arne Slot perhaps was guilty of something similar) it was an early pratfall in the greater narrative of their Champions League success in Istanbul later that season.
Related: Miron Muslic: ‘Real life is a lot more difficult than playing a football game’
That such history is even being discussed suggests how important Plymouth’s win was for the FA Cup, a competition that constantly has to fight for relevance. This may not be the glory of old – there was uproar in 1959 when Billy Liddell, one star, let alone an entire team, was spared the icy pitch at Worcester – but a certain magic remains. The past two rounds had seen a number of giants having to battle to see off minnows, but the competition needed a defining shock and now it has it.
For Liverpool there are awful imagined futures: documentaries produced 20, 30 years from now in which the narrator breathily intones, “For Slot, this was the moment at which it all began to go wrong.” But it really shouldn’t be. Sunday was one defeat in an otherwise almost impeccable season with an almost unrecognisable side against opponents who, as they had proved against Brentford in the previous round, are nowhere near as porous as their league record under Wayne Rooney had suggested. Plymouth may still be bottom of the Championship but they are a far more robust unit now than they were in conceding 25 goals in the seven league games before Rooney was sacked.
Still, the doubt will be there, at least until Wednesday’s rearranged game against Everton, the last Merseyside derby at Goodison. The decision to prioritise that game and last Thursday’s Carabao Cup semi-final against Tottenham is readily understandable, but what if some vital momentum has been lost? What if this is the moment at which, the Quadruple unexpectedly rendered impossible, they glance down and realise there is nothing actually sustaining them? What if the gods of football are outraged by the implied disrespect to the oldest Cup competition in the world? It’s not particularly rational to think Liverpool will suddenly collapse, but a lot in football isn’t; superstition lurks always just under the surface.
Slot himself, as he had done all season, seemed admirably unruffled. He took his medicine and was gracious in defeat. One of his great strengths has been how fresh Liverpool seem. To criticise him now for his team selection would be an extremely abrupt volte face. And yet at the same time, before Sunday’s game it had still seemed possible that he might wander into English football and in his unflustered, slightly dislocated way – forever having to point out when he has made a joke – walk away with an unprecedented Quadruple. And now that dream, however unrealistic, is gone.
Related: ‘Maybe they deserve to be a bit lucky’: Slot defends lineup after Plymouth loss
It shouldn’t matter. Indeed, there’s an argument that going out of the Cup will create space in the calendar, but squads can be delicate things. Liverpool have now failed to win five of their last 11 games: that run that admittedly includes the first leg of a tie they ultimately won comfortably and a Champions League dead rubber, but they are not quite the implacable machine of the autumn. Everton, rejuvenated under David Moyes, will be a major test.
But this shouldn’t really be about ramifications in the league. Sunday was a great day for the FA Cup.
On this day…
Ivano Bonetti was a prodigiously talented midfielder but one whose work-rate and attitude toward his defensive responsibilities regularly irritated managers. He had gone through seven Italian clubs, two of them twice, when aged 30, his career seemed to have come to an end at Torino. A deal was struck with Grimsby, then in the second flight, but it involved paying £100,000 to a US company who owned his rights. Bonetti paid half himself and Grimsby fans cobbled together the other £50,000. At first it worked. At the end of November, Grimsby were second in the league. That month, Bonetti had scored the winner at West Brom and torn Tranmere apart.
But Grimsby hit a poor run. A 3-2 defeat at Luton on 10 February 1996 meant they had gone 10 league games in a row without a win. As the player-manager Brian Laws, who had worked under Brian Clough at Nottingham Forest, raged about Bonetti’s performance, an incident occurred that left the Italian with a fractured cheekbone, reportedly after Laws threw a plate of chicken wings at him (although the precise details have never been made clear). Bonetti left Grimsby at the end of the season, while Laws was dismissed early in the following campaign.
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This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Have a question for Jonathan? Email [email protected], and he’ll answer the best in a future edition.
