Scoring seven goals, Jürgen Klopp and Liverpool know what it is; take seven too. This Sunday, October 4, 2020, they came to Villa Park with three wins in three matches, and not against just anyone: Leeds from Bielsea, Chelsea and Arsenal. A record worthy of the defending champion they were.
Two hours later, they emerged from the lawn with their heads bowed in shock. The Villans won 7-2. Seven goals! Implausible. To find a precedent for this annihilation, you had to go back to 1963, when Shankly’s Liverpool were still learning to breathe at the top of the English football pyramid, which they had only climbed two years earlier.
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Klopp then merely said “we lost the ball” for any explanation, and perhaps there was no other. It was indeed a freak result. The Reds would not lose a single one of their twelve league matches to follow. Victims of an incredible series of injuries, they would then weaken in the spring, to recover in time and obtain a new qualification for the Champions League.
There were two lessons to be learned from the slap received in Birmingham: first, that a setback as spectacular as the one received on this occasion does not necessarily deserve to be considered as revealing a deeper evil; the second, that Liverpool – that of Klopp, in any case – is an animal apart, which happens to have moments of bewilderment which are the counterpart of what makes its strength, its ability to merge individual energies into an irresistible whole. Because if Aston Villa was a moment of bewilderment, it was not the only one.
The Liverpool Dosage
Above all, Liverpool relies on a balance of forces, a mixture of elements which, when the balance is right, produces a reaction capable of blowing up whatever obstacle it comes into contact with, as Barcelona exploded on a certain evening in May 2019, and Manchester United did it again this Sunday; and which, when it is imperfect, makes it the first victim. The explosion becomes an implosion. This had been the case at Villa Park. And it was last month at Anfield, when Real Madrid turned the situation around so spectacularly in a match that the Reds had started perfectly (2-5).
This is the “human, too human” side of the Reds, too often in evidence this season, already mentioned here, to the point that we wondered if Klopp, having reached the end of his seven-year term at Liverpool, would not live not again what he had experienced in Mainz and Borussia Dortmund at the end of the same mandate, as if the “7” was his “13” to him.
The comparison, however, is absurd. Less than a year ago, Liverpool were still aiming for an unheard-of quadruple that no team in the world has ever achieved, and which they missed by almost nothing. Since then, Klopp has had to manage, in addition to injuries, departures which were not limited to that of Sadio Mané, of whom we may only now be able to measure what he brought to the Reds. Michael Edwards, the club’s sporting director, a key figure in its transformation over the past ten years, is no longer there. His successor Julian Ward, who replaced him last summer after having been his assistant, will leave at the end of this season, which, in other words, means that he is already gone.
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The owners of Liverpool, the Fenway Sports Group, have not yet finished their waltz-hesitation sung to an air of Norman folklore, “j’vendrai-t’y, j’vendrai-t’y pas”, which is not the most exciting for anyone who wants to get on the track. And Thiago Alcantara is injured again. As Luis Diaz always is, and Diogo Jota was, so is Virgil van Dijk.
If there is one person that Liverpool cannot do without today, it is not magic Mo Salah, it is his coach, the only one to keep a cool head in the state of overheating that his football encourages, and that the turbulence that his club is going through has done nothing to temper. Nobody knows better than him that his team has reached the threshold of truth of the greatest teams, the one at which renewal has become essential, ignoring the emotions shared until then.
Means without certainties
If very few managers, at least managers of the modern era, have been offered a comparable mission, it is because very few have deserved it. Alex Ferguson was a master at this exercise; but he was supported by a structure that gave him the means to live beyond the short term, a structure whose stability guaranteed his own. Arsene Wenger saw his hands tied by the financial tourniquet of the move from Highbury to the Emirates. Pep Guardiola, the only contemporary manager who, along with Klopp, can be compared to them in the context of English football, has resources that are limited only by the supposed constraints of Financial Fair Play.
Klopp is in a different situation. The means are there, but not the certainties. FSG, still hesitant about their future commitment, will not match Chelsea and Newcastle in the transfer market.
The signs are there, however, that the transition has begun. Klopp had assembled the finest attacking trio in contemporary European football in the space of three seasons. Roberto Firmino, who struggled at first, arrived in 2015 (and will leave in a few months). Sadio Mané followed him in 2016 (but is now at Bayern). Mohamed Salah completed the set of aces in 2017 – not to mention a joker named Divock Origi. In the space of just over two seasons, Klopp could turn it into a poker game.
Diogo Jota got the ball rolling in September 2020. Luis Diaz joined the Portuguese in January 2022, Darwin Nuñez five months later. Cody Gakpo has only been a Red for a few weeks. With a Salah still capable of caressing the peaks, what these can offer together is a dream. As time continues to accelerate, without anyone really knowing why, we have expressed doubts about Nuñez and (and there, we are bordering on the ridiculous) about Gakpo, as if this trio had to find its marks immediately. They did it on Sunday. What one should understand is that in doing so, they were ahead of what one would expect.
This is unusual. Usually, you don’t rebuild a team starting from its tip, but from its defense or its midfield, two segments in which this Liverpool shows its age, and its limits, which the hatching of Stefan Bajçetić makes even more sensitive. .
But in doing so, Klopp remains true to himself, in that it is never fear that drives him, but hope. In other words, the man of a situation which is not as worrying as one wanted to say.
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