You only need to look at Man United's ongoing post-Fergie traumas to realise the scale of Arne Slot's incredible achievement at Liverpool, writes OLIVER HOLT

There was a moment, midway through the first half at the King Power Stadium on Sunday afternoon, as Liverpool moved to within an inch of their 20th league title, when a miscued clearance from one of their players ballooned high into the air and headed out of play.

Arne Slot saw it coming, adjusted his body as it fell over his shoulder and caught it in front of the dugout before handing it nonchalantly to a Leicester City defender. It was Slot’s stellar first season in the English game in microcosm. This is a man who has refused to drop the ball.

As Liverpool prepare to be anointed champions at some point this week – it could happen on Wednesday if Arsenal lose at home to Crystal Palace, or Sunday if they beat Tottenham at Anfield – there is vanishingly little room for debate about who should be crowned LMA Manager of the Year next month.

Some have sought to make a case for Nuno Espirito Santo for the quite brilliant job he has done at Nottingham Forest and others have pushed the cause of Andoni Iraola for his superb work at Bournemouth, and Eddie Howe, who led Newcastle to their first domestic trophy for 70 years and whose credentials are burnished with every year in management.

But if Mohamed Salah is a shoo-in for the FWA Footballer of the Year award when the voting closes in a few weeks, then Slot, who arrived in the English game last summer after being poached from Feyenoord, richly deserves the accolades that are about to come his way as the season draws to a close made anti-climactic by his side’s dominance.

If you want an idea of the scale of Slot’s achievement at Anfield this season, after he took over from Jurgen Klopp, you need only take a look at what happened to other leviathans of English football when great leaders retired or moved away.

Look at Manchester United post-Sir Alex Ferguson. They are still caught deep in the agonies of transition even now, 12 years after he quit, and if the drama of their extra-time Europa League quarter-final victory over Lyon was an example of the beauty of football, it was also a reminder of the chaos that still envelops the club.

Arsenal are only just emerging from the period of uncertainty and loss of identity that came upon them in the years after Arsene Wenger left in 2018, even if the period of decline began long before Wenger departed. A manager as good as Unai Emery could not survive the trauma of that transition.

There have been times when it has seemed the task would swallow up Mikel Arteta, too, and when gloom has washed over the Emirates. It has really only been in the past couple of seasons, particularly with the Champions League quarter-final victory over Real Madrid last week, that the club can say with confidence they have been born again.

The true scale of Slot’s achievement can be measured in the fact Liverpool have suffered none of those agonies of transition in the wake of Klopp’s emotional and much-lamented departure at the end of last season.

Let us not play down what a damaging moment that could have been in Liverpool’s history. Klopp set the emotional tone for the club more than any manager since Bill Shankly. He was a populist, as Shankly was. He was a demagogue, as Shankly was. He was intense and unrelenting, as Shankly was. He encapsulated everything Liverpool stood for, as Shankly did.

Many, me included, expected Liverpool to take some time to recover from his departure. I thought the best they could hope for in Slot’s first season would be to finish in the top four. I thought there was a chance, especially with three of their biggest players coming to the end of their contracts, that everything might fall apart, United-style.

Liverpool, remember, used to have an internal failsafe for moments like this, a talent factory called the Boot Room, founded informally under Shankly, that produced giants of football men such as Bob Paisley, Ruben Bennett, Tom Saunders, Joe Fagan, Ronnie Moran and Roy Evans, a production line that gave them continuity for 30 years or more.

Slot, like Klopp, was not part of a succession like that. He has the benefit of the support of a new kind of brains trust, the brilliant recruitment team spearheaded by Michael Edwards, Fenway Sports Group’s CEO of football, and Richard Hughes, the club’s sporting director, who helped secure the signatures of Virgil van Dijk and Salah on new contracts.

But this season was on him. This season was down to Slot and his management style and his football intelligence and his human intelligence. It was down to the fact he was strong enough and secure enough in himself to acknowledge Klopp had left him with a strong group of players and that a revolution was not needed.

But what Slot did from then onwards has marked him out already as a leading managerial talent of this era. His impact in his first season in the English game has been compared to the effect of the arrival of Jose Mourinho at Chelsea in 2004 but, unlike Mourinho, Slot does not feel the need to make meretricious gestures or trumpet his own abilities.

He worked with what he was given. There were no lavish new signings. Slot concentrated on improving players instead. The most obvious example is Ryan Gravenberch, who had been a marginal figure under Klopp but became the hub of Slot’s side and has been one of the players of the season.

Slot made Liverpool more solid, too. They may not be as breathlessly attractive going forward as they were under Klopp, and there may be no creative player in the side to match Roberto Firmino, but they have become far less vulnerable at the back. They have become masters of consistency.

That is in a season, remember, when Slot has dealt with the soap operas concerning the contracts of Van Dijk, Salah and Trent Alexander-Arnold with grace, class and the kind of emotional intelligence that prevented the saga from derailing the season, as it might have done if he had handled it differently.

If Liverpool win their remaining five games, they will finish on 94 points. Even if they don’t, they are on target for one of the finest seasons in the last 30 years. They have only lost two league games.

And still some seek to damn Slot with faint praise. Some will say it has been a poor season. Some will point to the implosion of Manchester City, for so long Liverpool’s nemesis under Klopp. Some will say Arsenal choked, that Chelsea are a joke, that United are irredeemable and Spurs are lost.

But Liverpool are none of these things. And that is down to Slot.

FA Cup overshadowed 

The FA still maintain, laughably, that they have not betrayed the FA Cup, but the latest stage in the competition’s attempted obliteration by the Premier League will come on Sunday, when the semi-final between Nottingham Forest and Manchester City will be overshadowed by Liverpool’s league clash with Spurs and likely title coronation at Anfield. 

Another triumph of scheduling for the game’s governing body.

Diamond in the rough 

Amid all the ongoing plaudits for Rory McIlroy, there should be more than a few words for his caddie, Harry Diamond, too. 

Diamond, one of McIlroy’s oldest friends, took over on his bag in 2017 and has, at various times in the last eight years, found himself identified by some of golf’s cognoscenti as a reason for McIlroy’s Major drought. 

McIlroy, it was sometimes said, needed the firmer voice of a more experienced caddie in his ear. McIlroy ignored that advice. He never wavered in his loyalty to Diamond, just as Diamond never wavered in his loyalty to him. 

And on that extraordinary Masters Sunday, when McIlroy had missed the 6ft putt on the 18th green that sent his battle with Justin Rose into a play-off, it was Diamond who inspired him for the last push. 

‘Well, pal,’ Diamond said to him, as McIlroy contemplated his chances, ‘we would have taken this last Monday morning.’ It flicked a switch for McIlroy. 

It was the perfect message at the perfect time. And this may be one of the things that pleased the Northern Irishman most about his victory: no one will be able to criticise Diamond’s worth again.