Is Liverpool's 6-Point Start Truly Champion Stuff?

Newcastle and the Reds played out an early match-of-the-season at St. James' Park. It's already a bit of a Rorschach Test.

St. James’ Park is always a cauldron, but this was something else. The rolling tides of song swishing about the stadium, the fever pitch when anybody in black-and-white won a challenge.

Newcastle fans always think they can make the difference, not unlike their opponents here at their own home ground. “We can make this a really difficult place for [them] to play,” John Williams told me of the sentiment at Anfield when Liverpool completed that comeback against Barcelona. “That victory was our victory.”

Every touch on Monday night crackled with electricity, every challenge was life and death. Hugo Ekitike was booed because … he was once linked to Newcastle in the press but joined Liverpool?

It was ruthless, and so were the Magpies. Liverpool were summarily outplayed over the first half an hour. They had no control in midfield and were once again cut through relatively easily, just like in Matchweek One, even with the return of Ryan Gravenberch to (theoretically) hold things down.

But it was that 23-year-old Dutchman in midfield who delivered the sucker punch to Newcastle’s chin and once again proved the Iron Law of Football: You’ve got to score when you’re on top, and if you don’t take your chances, you will be punished. His clever strike, low and hard from distance, opened the scoring and kicked off what ultimately turned out to be the match of the season at this early stage.

Anthony Gordon soon went steaming into Virgil Van Dijk and got himself sent off, dealing Newcastle’s ambitions in this game a (seemingly) disastrous blow. Liverpool took a bit more control after that, got to halftime, then came out and scored pretty much instantly to (apparently) kill the game. And then, with 10 men, Newcastle came roaring back into the match, fueled by spite and fury, somehow pulling it back to 2-2.

And then they threw it away again, 100-plus minutes in: Anthony Elanga fell asleep at the end of a very long shift and failed to help out at the back post, Liverpool swarmed in, and Dominik Szoboszlai ran onto a low Mo Salah cross and played a brilliant silent pass. The ball just seemed to present itself to 16-year-old Rio Ngumoha¹, completely unmarked with the whole North East of England as his playground. The youngster made no mistake, dispatching it with aplomb, and he wheeled away a match-winner. Three points to Liverpool, plucked from the roiling sea on Tyneside.

At halftime on NBC’s U.S. coverage, Danny Higginbotham suggested that Liverpool’s 1-0 advantage was just champion stuff. I had my doubts, despite the old adages around champions winning ugly when they have to, and I had a chuckle because Arsenal’s 1-0 grindfest away at Old Trafford just last week did not get the same treatment in many quarters. Arsenal are not the champions, to be fair, but Liverpool didn’t look it either when they soon enough threw away a 2-0 advantage against 10 men here.

Those two can test their title credentials against one another next Sunday, when they meet at the aforementioned Anfield, but in the meantime the Reds of Merseyside have some real questions swirling. Can they really expect Salah to put together another campaign like the last? Has Ibahima Konaté already dropped off a level at centerback? How much trouble are they in at fullback? And — though none dare say it — might it take some time for Florian Wirtz to adjust to the pace of the Premier League? Neither he nor Salah shone here.

There are fewer questions at striker, to be fair, even with the high-drama links to Alexander Isak that helped fuel the atmosphere at St. James’ Park on Monday. Ekitike looks the real deal up to this point, and for all their discombobulations, Liverpool look like scoring three or four whenever they step out. Perhaps, in the end, this lot will be a test of whether you can win titles by outgunning everyone you run into, scoring those three or four when your opponents get one or two.

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When Rasheed Wallace said, “Ball don’t lie,” he was talking free throws after a questionable foul call. If a player missed, it was because the basketball gods interfered, skewing the trajectory of the uncontested shot from 15 feet because it was a false foul that got the player those free throws in the first place.

So it was with Bruno Fernandes at Craven Cottage on Sunday.

Well, one difference is that missing a penalty is way worse than missing free throws, and getting that penalty is a way bigger deal, too, and Bruno would say — is still saying — that the referee put him off by jostling him while he was going through his pre-kick routine. That’s why he skied it into Saturn’s orbit.

And also: It actually was a foul.

You can’t say that Calvin Bassey’s roughhousing on Mason Mount in his own penalty area wasn’t a foul. It would have been called as such anytime, anywhere on the pitch — except, will it? Will this kind of offense be consistently penalized at corner kicks all season? Will we see penalties like this each and every time? Because for decades, this kind of thing just wasn’t penalty material, and it certainly wasn’t call-it-back-multiple-minutes-later-for-a-VAR-review material.

This is a new PGMOL fixation, about which we learned right before the season kicked off, to crack down on defenders’ tomfoolery at set pieces in their own 18-yard box. But is this just another Major Refereeing Initiative that will be enforced for 2.5 months until everybody forgets about it and we go back to the previous regime of legal wrestling at corner kicks?

My money is on the latter, particularly since in the very same game Manchester United’s Lenny Yoro shoved a defender in the back while fomenting his team’s opening goal. At the very same corner where the penalty was awarded, Luke Shaw was roughhousing with Rodrigo Muniz. These are subjective calls made by (very) human referees within a system already struggling for consistency.

The most likely outcome is we will have a handful of outlier decisions over these first couple of months. Pushing-and-shoving that’s been more than commonplace for decades will become illegal and harshly punished, and then it will just stop one day, probably some time in October or November.

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“It’s happened again, it’s happened agaaaain,” the Tottenham supporters crowed, and they had a point: They’ve beaten Manchester City in three of their last four meetings across all competitions, twice in a row at the Etihad Stadium. Since 2020, City have come away victorious from just six of 15 encounters with Spurs, losing eight.

Considering how poor Tottenham were at some of those junctures, we’re well into Bogey Team territory here. City simply have a problem with Spurs. They don’t like a fight with the lads in Lilywhite, to the point that it feels difficult to draw too many conclusions about whether new manager Thomas Frank is truly ushering in a new golden era at Tottenham. Six points, five goals scored, none conceded — it’s a stellar start to 2025/26 for the North Londoners, but it’s a long way from here to May. Having lost out on Eberechi Eze, they do still need a new creative force to create the magic to complement their improved structure.

For City, the picture is murkier. It certainly seems like Pep Guardiola’s grand revolution over the last two transfer windows, where the old guard was jettisoned and hundreds of millions of pounds in new players came in, may not go off without a hitch. Everybody — myself included — decided there was no way a Pep team could disappoint two seasons in a row, and maybe they will be in the thick of a title race come April and May. But in a relative rarity for the Catalan managerial legend, his team has something to prove.

1. The teenage situation at the top of the Premier League is getting crazy. With Max Dowman — even younger than Ngumoha — Arsenal have three in their team playing regularly.