Quadruple Talk Gets Harder To Ignore For Liverpool Manager And Players

Before this season began, the longest an English team had ever kept the dream of winning a Premier League, Champions League, League Cup, and FA Cup quadruple alive was May 1st. Chelsea’s 06-07 team made it all the way to the first day of May before a penalty shootout loss to Liverpool in the CL semi-final saw their hopes at a quad ended.

By defeating Manchester City yesterday to advance to the FA Cup Final, Liverpool have guaranteed they will carry their bid for a quad longer than any English team ever has. The earliest the Reds could potentially see their quad hopes dashed is May 3rd, the date of the second leg of their CL semi-final matchup with Villareal.

With three league matches between now and then, it’s possible that the Premier League could effectively be lost before May 3rd. However, even if LFC lose all 3 of those matches, they’ll still be mathematically alive for the Premier League title regardless of the results of league-leading Manchester City.

With yesterday’s victory and the reality that the quad dream is alive and well, it is getting harder and harder for Jürgen Klopp and his players to dodge questions from the media about the possibility of winning the quad. Though, they continue to downplay it and try to keep the focus on just the next match.

”We don’t talk about anything that could happen,” Virgil van Dijk told Sky Sports when asked about the possibility of winning the quadruple. “So, that’s all for you guys, you can’t put even more pressure on us than you’re already doing.

“We just focus on the game and today was a tough game against City. Maybe it’s the last time this season we play against each other, maybe not. But now we have to do everything to recover, we have to do everything to recover - it was an intense game - and make sure we are ready for [Manchester] United.”

In his post-match press conference, Klopp pointed out that while advancing to the FA Cup final keeps the dream alive, it also adds another match to a packed schedule, and that ultimately makes everything a little more difficult.

“You can mention whatever you want, it doesn’t make it more likely,” Klopp said. “A game like today shows it even more, how unlikely it is to do something like that. To get through now against City, which is incredibly difficult and intense.

“We play again against Man Utd. With their three points today, and the results for Tottenham and Arsenal, the fight for the Champions League spot; the door is open to all three so they will be on their toes. It’s certainly not a friendly game.

“Then a few days later we play Everton. The situation they are in, it will not be a friendly game. Then we play Villarreal. It will not be a friendly game. Then Newcastle. It’s incredibly intense and it’s really unlikely that a team will win all the games.

“We have an FA Cup final now which means the Southampton game will be moved. It will be played in midweek, it’s really unlikely, but I couldn’t care less to be honest. Let’s go for it, let’s try to win the next game and see how we recover between now and then. We will see.”

Not everyone, however, was so hesitant to acknowledge that they dream of winning the quad. Alisson Becker and Sadio Mané both admitted it, but they also pointed out that they can’t afford to look too far ahead at this point.

“We do not have much time to think about all the things,” Alisson told beIN Sports. “Our head is always focused on the next game and next challenge we have. Of course, we dream about that, but we dream awake with our feet on the ground and being humble.

“We need to keep on going with what we are doing in the Premier League, Champions League, and now we have reached one big target we had from the beginning of the season: to reach the FA Cup final.”

“We’ll see,” Mané told BBC Sport after the match. “We have a lot of games to go, we will try to do our best. It’s a dream, for sure. We’ll go for it, we’ll fight for it.”