Liverpool and Jurgen Klopp deserve a good deal of praise and credit for reaching a Champions League final and to suggest otherwise would be to pull the shutters down around personal bias.
It is important, however, not to succumb to giddy hyperbole because, should the Reds prevail over Real Madrid in Kiev on May 26th, where is there left to go? Already this past week, Mark Lawrenson has compared Klopp to Bill Shankly, while Daily Telegraph hack Chris Bascombe has declared him to be ‘more than equal’ to Pep Guardiola. More than equal? That’s another way of saying ‘better’, right?
If Liverpool are building up a good head of steam on the continent at present then the same can be said of their perception within the media, and if a sixth European Cup is attained later this month then it’s all too easy to imagine the inundation of nonsensical platitudes to come. There will almost certainly be a think-piece insisting that the German coach is Liverpool’s greatest ever gaffer and the logic put forward by the author will be that it is so much more difficult in the modern era to forge a collective team vision, what with agents and other distractions – pressures that Klopp’s predecessors did not have.
There will also inevitably be favourable comparisons made between this Liverpool side and a Manchester City XI that has won the Premier League at its earliest ever juncture, while some bright spark looking to capitalise on the jubilation of a fan-base is sure to place Milner and co. high in the firmament of all-time great British sides.
Some pre-emptive perspective is needed then – and fast.
Let’s start with the big picture and work our way in. Liverpool is not a great team and Jurgen Klopp is not a great manager. He crafts exhilarating sides full of ferocious attacking intent but it is a singular strategy inbuilt with an inherent and significant flaw, in that they are decidedly ordinary when it comes to breaking down stubborn, well-organised banks of four.
This season they have come unstuck against Burnley, Stoke, and West Brom (twice). Last season they were neutralised by Burnley, Bournemouth and Crystal Palace. And next season take your pick because there WILL be sides who will deprive them of space to enact their devastating sprees; who will place ten men behind the ball and essentially say, ‘come on then, what have you got? Without your blood and thunder and bombastic pace what do you have?’ and the answer will be ‘not a lot,’ besides plenty of huffing and puffing and an ability to blow the house down.
That is not a great side overseen by a great manager. Great sides do not require opponents to play a certain way. Great sides find a way.
When it became apparent that Manchester City were rampaging through the league with a style and substance unparalleled in recent years, opponents took fright and set themselves up as a carapace. On every occasion City had a cuteness and cunning to succeed.
Liverpool’s one-dimensional superpower is precisely why they will always be a very real threat in cup competitions where – barring the exceptional exception when an opponent seeks out penalties from the opening whistle – teams are susceptible to being blown away. In the league though – week-on-week, month-on-month – such passion-play is simply not sustainable. It never will be. Not for the whole nine yards.
And it is league titles that determine greatness: not riding a wave of momentum that takes you past Maribor and Porto and Manchester City (at this point, let’s at least cede that if Manchester City are by some considerable distance Liverpool’s betters then the Reds are the former’s Achilles heel. Let’s also cede that nobody remembers who exactly threw the spear in that historical analogy).
As Brian Clough once noted: “I will gladly go out of the European Cup, the football League Cup and the FA Cup if you could guarantee me winning the football league. Because that is the one where you have to have every single aspect of football management about you to win it.”
On that note, let’s remind ourselves how Liverpool have fared this season after a full campaign last year under Klopp that led to a fourth place finish (and no silverware of any note) and three-quarters of a campaign before that that took them to eighth (and no silverware of any note).
This time out Liverpool have fired on every conceivable cylinder. They have maximised their manager’s ethos and done so boasting a player in Mohamed Salah who has enjoyed a freak purple-patch that has harvested 43 goals. They have been fortunate to avoid key injuries throughout.
This then is the best that Klopp can do and hope for.
Yet his team still resides a startling 21 points behind City having played a game more. City’s game in hand is against Brighton at home and given that the Blues will start that fixture as 2/9 favourites, it’s reasonable to presume that gap up to its full 24 and if we do that, we match the present gap between Liverpool and their struggling neighbours Everton. We would only be two points off the difference between bottom of the table West Brom and seventh placed, high-flying Burnley.
It is a vast chasm in class and consistency. It is the difference between eight wins and eight losses across a season.
So then, Chris Bascombe, is Klopp really ‘more than equal’ to a coach set to smash every meaningful record that the Premier League can throw up? By the season’s end, Guardiola’s creation will have most likely accrued more points and goals in a single year than any other side since the league’s inception. Furthermore, they will have done so while playing an extraordinary standard of beautiful football that has raised the bar of what is possible on domestic turf in the modern era.
This weekend Liverpool travel to Stamford Bridge, where a defeat will put their four hopes in jeopardy.
Some perspective; that’s all that is needed here. An acceptance that a Champions League triumph will be a magnificent achievement from a very good side who ride momentum arguably better than anyone other than a handful of sides across Europe. An acceptance, too, that the arrival of Naby Keita and the possible arrival of a top-class goalkeeper this summer will make the Reds better equipped to mount a more sustained challenge for the runner-up spot next term, instead of being bested by a United outfit with an identity crisis.
You can’t blame Liverpool supporters for getting hopelessly carried away right now. They would not be doing their job as a fan if they weren’t. As far as the media goes, however, it is hoped they stop pandering to this giddiness in return for easy clicks.
Because otherwise they’re in danger of looking positively stupid.
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