Did you know that eight different books have been released to commemorate the story of Liverpool’s second-placed finish in the Premier League and how close they came to re-establishing themselves as the champions last season?

Only one was brought out about the champions, Manchester City, and it is certainly a strange set of events that there was a full summer’s worth of reading about the club where Bill Shankly’s old prophecy about first being first, and second being nowhere, is almost as much a part of the history as the Anfield gates.

The first was released 10 days after the final game of the season. The next was six days later, followed by three more in June, two in July and one in August. Two have the same title, Make us Dream, not to be confused with Daring to Dream, or indeed They Dared to Dream. Another takes its name, We Go Again, from the line Steven Gerrard used after beating City, and there is something rather quaint about the one that goes by the straightforward A Surprising Season. All tell the story of Luis Suárez bludgeoning defences and the exhilaration when everything started to fall into place. And what a story it was in those days and weeks when the bus was inching through the throngs outside the stadium and Anfield, once again, felt like the place to be.

None, though, has a happy ending. Liverpool will be reminded of that when they return to Selhurst Park on Sunday and the scene of so much sporting desolation the last time they played Crystal Palace that when the television cameras panned away from Suárez, sobbing beneath his shirt, they picked out a Liverpool Echo reporter in the stand. He, too, was in tears.

A fortnight ago, the opposition was Chelsea, bringing another set of raw memories, and perhaps the most conclusive evidence yet that Gerrard has not been the same player since his ordeal the previous time they met. Brendan Rodgers was booed for making unpopular substitutions and, even with two-thirds of the season to go, it would need a particularly vivid imagination to see how Liverpool can possibly stop themselves now from reaching 25 years without a league title. Liverpool are then on course to equal, and probably surpass, Manchester United’s record from 1967 to 1993. The difference, unfortunately for them, is they have just moved on the player who offered them what Eric Cantona did for Alex Ferguson.

This is certainly a delicate moment for Rodgers but, even by the standards of the modern game, it seems faintly preposterous that press releases have started arriving from various bookmakers announcing that he and Manuel Pellegrini, the top two in the league last season, are moving up the betting-shop chalkboards in the running to be the next managerial casualty. Let us have some common sense here. Rodgers was named manager of the year in May. To go from that kind of position to being told his job is suddenly in danger feels like football at its kneejerking worst.

Yet managers, like players, go through periods of good, bad and indifferent form and here’s a statistic to make you think: did you realise that Rodgers has won 52.63% of his games at Liverpool whereas David Moyes’s win ratio with United was 52.94%?

At the same time, take a considered look at Liverpool’s signings in the Rodgers era. Daniel Sturridge, despite his luckless run with injuries, can be filed with Philippe Coutinho as good buys and Alberto Moreno looks an accomplished left-back. Yet it is a thin file. Adam Lallana, Emre Can and Javier Manquillo are entitled to more time but Dejan Lovren and Lazar Markovic have started their Liverpool careers in a way that makes them look dreadfully overpriced. Joe Allen is a more rounded player than many perceive but Gazzetta dello Sport probably called it right after Real Madrid had left their calling card at Anfield and the newspaper described him as “inadequate at this level”.

Then consider Iago Aspas, Luis Alberto, Aly Cissokho, Mamadou Sakho, Nuri Sahin, Samed Yesil, Tiago Ilori, Victor Moses and Oussama Assaidi. Kolo Touré and Simon Mignolet are too erratic for a club with Liverpool’s ambitions. And what of Mario Balotelli, Rickie Lambert and Fabio Borini, three strikers who have played 998 minutes of league football this season and not managed a single goal?

Hypothetical, of course, but it is tempting to wonder if there are people at Anfield who now suspect it might have been worth putting up with the hassle that comes with Suárez rather than waving through his transfer to Barcelona.

Yes, he frequently offered the impression that he was no more trustworthy than a rattlesnake that had removed its rattle. His offending was of the serial nature and it probably sums him up that the Premier League lost its best player in the summer and its chief executive, Richard Scudamore, still sounded glad to be shot of him.

Yet Suárez belongs to the small band who seem to be on first-name terms with the ball. Briefly, he did make Liverpool’s fans dare to dream. That’s why Liverpool tried to become the first team to win 9-0 away in the history of the Premier League on that wild night at Selhurst. When Suárez popped in the third goal, tucked the ball under his arm and sprinted back to the centre-circle, the crazy thing is it wasn’t utterly beyond the realms of possibility. He was a swine, but he was a brilliant swine, and the common assumption that he would have withdrawn his gifts and drifted resentfully to the edges had Liverpool pulled down the shutters on Barcelona is simply incorrect.

Suárez is the guy whose foot was broken, growing up in Montevideo, when a car ran over him but carried on playing until the plaster cast was completely worn away at the heel. “I know what you are like, I know how you live,” Rodgers told him after that dalliance with Arsenal the previous summer. Sure, Suárez was aggrieved and for a couple of months he and Rodgers barely exchanged a word, but he still gave absolutely everything on the pitch. As long as he had kept doing that, Liverpool would have been authentic challengers. The size of his grudge would have been irrelevant.

Instead, Balotelli’s first few months at Anfield can probably be summed up by a moment of tragicomedy before the Chelsea game when his team-mates were going through the pre-match hugging and comradeship routine and he was out by the wing, staring into the middle-distance, apparently oblivious to what was going on in the centre circle. Sturridge’s injury record makes it legitimate to wonder if he will always be undermined by physical shortcomings and, as for Gerrard, it is starting to feel as if Liverpool’s captain might have been jarred more than we know by the way everything unravelled last season. One thing Gerrard does not lack is competitive courage. He can, however, be tremendously hard on himself and his story is so entwined with Liverpool’s it is virtually impossible to think he has got it out of his system.

Gerrard does not deserve trial by Opta but the number-crunchers can show you he has made fewer tackles, goals, interceptions and runs this season. One statistic in particular leaps out. Gerrard regularly covered 11km in matches last season. This season, he has not run that far once. He is 35 on his next birthday, and age catches up with everyone in the end, especially when there are other statistics that show the Premier League is 20% faster now than in 2007.

Liverpool have lost their control of matches and Rodgers has started talking up performances that, plainly, have not merited such acclaim. Liverpool, apparently, were desperately unfortunate to lose to Madrid at the Bernabéu (Liverpool did not manage a shot until 10 minutes into the second half). Rodgers took a similar line against Chelsea and the deception was obvious again. It is an old managerial trick, designed to manipulate the headlines, and it is as see-through as it is unoriginal.

Liverpool have lost all their forward momentum. Southampton, having banked two-thirds of the Suárez money for Lallana, Lovren and Lambert, must be sniggering behind their hands as they peer down the table from second place. Chelsea have become a speck in the distance and Liverpool are approaching a milestone they would never have thought possible when Alan Hansen lifted the trophy in 1990. From here, it is threatening to be an awfully long way back.

Moussi’s game of faith, hope and charity

It has been another strange week inside football’s bubble courtesy of Dave Whelan transporting us into an old episode of Mind Your Language, another round of charm school from Fifa, the latest on Ched Evans and an exchange of texts between the Football Association and England’s official band during the Scotland friendly to ask if they could be good enough to back off accompanying anti-IRA tunes.

The trumpeters and drummers have since explained that they did not hear all those people singing around them for several minutes on end. And who are we to doubt them?

A nod of appreciation to Whelan, too, for pointing out that he often holidays in Barbados and has lots of Jewish and Chinese friends, so there is absolutely no way all that stuff he said was how he meant it or, failing that, the only other possible explanation was that a journalist with enough professional awards to fill an aircraft hangar had misquoted him. Which is a relief, because there was a moment back there when Wigan Athletic’s chairman seemed to think PR stood for Prat and Relic.

As for Evans, he has discovered that, contrary to the song adopted by some Sheffield United fans, he cannot do what he wants. It doesn’t quite explain why Marlon King, with sexual assault among his extensive previous convictions, was playing at Bramall Lane last season without any real fuss. But football has never bothered itself with consistency and Evans will have to wait to get hooked up at another club. Someone, somewhere, will decide he deserves another chance once he is fit again and, most importantly, ready to start banging them in again. Wigan, quite possibly.

Enough of that, though, and take a moment to consider a story that has not had anything like the coverage it probably deserves. Step forward Guy Moussi, out of the game since he was released by Nottingham Forest at the end of last season, but now back in the Championship with Birmingham City. Moussi signed his two-month contract only after specifying that he doesn’t want a penny for himself and all of his wages are split between four charities – the club’s disabled supporters’ organisation, Stop Ebola, his church in Paris and the Soma mining disaster fund in Turkey.

Moussi is not single-handedly going to take the usual suspects off the back pages (Malky Mackay, I hear, will be very fortunate if more revelations about his time at Cardiff don’t surface over the coming months). But I hope it doesn’t sound terribly pious to say Moussi has reminded us that football is not the cesspit it is sometimes made out. If we had a Man of the Week award, it is his.

And, football being the industry it is, let us hope he is not experiencing what Niall Quinn went through, back in 2002, when he started the modern trend of donating testimonial earnings to charity.

“Embarrassing and awkward,” Quinn recalls of the publicity. “When I close my eyes, all I can see are lads in dressing rooms up and down the country pointing to their newspapers and them saying what I’d say myself: ‘Who does that twat think he is?’”