Hello and welcome to Liberal. The podcast about football, the least important of the least important things,

as all Liverpool fans have been saying to each other for the last seven or eight weeks.

I'm Rory Smith of The Observer and Men in Blazers, and I'm here with John Bruin of John Brewing Enterprises.

Hello, John.

Hello, Rory. And with Tarrick Panja, who works the New York Times, which also provides subscribers with access to wirecutter, the cooking app, the athletic, and of course, games, all for an introductory price of just £1 a month for your first year. Head to NYTimes.com slash subscriptions to claim yours. Hi, Tarek. Thank you for such your fulsome intro, Rory. It's important people know who you work for. Today's episode is a chance to take stock of the Premier League so far. That's right. It's an international break. We're scrubbing now for content. So we're going to take a look at the title race, the mission creep of mid-table, the recipe to survive relegation, and we're going to provide you the listener, our beloved

listeners, with a comprehensive list of which Premier League teams are officially happy. But we're

going to start with what I think is the story of the season so far, which you'll be unsurprised

to learn after Manchester City's comprehensive

defeat of an abysmal Liverpool at the Etterhad on Sunday is the collapse of Liverpool in general

and Mo Salah in particular. Tarrick, they were pretty bad yesterday Liverpool, weren't they?

I think they were dreadful. They reminded me of what they looked like a few weeks ago,

before everyone said they sorted themselves out with those games against Villa and Real Madrid.

It didn't seem like they knew what they were doing again. There was 11 players in the pitch.

One of them played really well, as usual. So Bozlai. And then there was chaos, brittle in defense,

and finding it really hard to create chances until they were two nil down or three nil down and then creating chances and then missing

them and then a general feels like there's a malaise a lack of confidence that comes from all

of this as well and it's hard to know I mean you guys obviously watch the game as well it's hard to know. I mean, you guys obviously watch the game as well.

It's hard to know how good Manchester City were, given how bad Liverpool were as well.

When you watch something like that, this traditionally is a really big game, but it almost didn't

feel like that. We'll come on to City a little bit, as they are now in my mind, in the title

race section of the podcast in a way that Liverpool are not.

I think, John, the big thing for me was that Liverpool had, not sorts of themselves out necessarily,

...