I hope so, but for me, Chelsea and City are still ahead of us because of the experience they have. It's gonna be a hell of a season !
It's annoying - 9 out of 10 seasons you would look at this Liverpool team and say 'clear favourites for the title'. Can you imagine if we had this squad and manager for the season Leicester won the title?! It'd be an effortless rout!
But I certainly hear what you are saying and because of their dominance last season I would still put City favourites. Chelsea however? Excellent side as ever but I would be, hand on heart and as neutral as possible, hesitant to put them ahead of us in the odds for the title.
When they won the league two seasons ago under Conte they took advantage of a league where their rivals were in transition - namely us, City and Man Utd (not that they've ever been in transition in reality). I think a lot of Chelsea's players have been in their 'prime' for quite a while now whereas the vast majority of our squad are entering that prime now. I think the perception of ascent in ability makes one feel stronger than a team whose players have levelled off from an ascent that occurred a few years ago. But the addition of Jorginho is a massive plus for them. It seems he's added about 10-15% to their possession stats alone yet as they showed today they can have all that possession but their second rate attack (in comparison to ours and City's) will limit the effects of that possession.
Further to this, I actually think they've had by far the easiest start to the season out of the whole of the top 6, the whole league even. Opening their season against a fast degenerating Huddersfield, home against a rudderless Arsenal trying to make sense of the transition imposed by Emery, a victory away to a stagnant and stalling Newcastle and two standard home victories against Bournemouth and the outright awful Cardiff City makes for something of a bit of context regarding their run in. Credit to them though - you can only beat what's in front of you and they've done it well but compared to our start where we were away to tricky away grounds at Palace, Leicester and Spurs and you start to see the fixture list in the first two months had fallen much more kindly for Sarri and co. Next week will be interesting though.
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