Eight months after winning the Premier League title, Jurgen Klopp came close to suggesting Liverpool’s principal target is to qualify for the Champions League.
Should Manchester City become the third successive side to win at Anfield on Sunday, the gap between the two clubs will be 10 points. City will have a game in hand. These are not advantages clubs managed by Pep Guardiola tend to squander.
Asked in the aftermath of Wednesday’s 1-0 defeat by Brighton if they were still contenders for a title they won by 18 points in June, Klopp replied: “I am the manager of Liverpool. I have to say: ‘We want to be champions. Yes we want it’. But you need to win games and you need performances for that and we don’t have that. That is the truth. We have to fight for other things now.”
They will fight without not just the spine of their side but the ribs as well. Against Brighton, Klopp was missing £311m-worth of players – Alisson, Van Dijk, Matip, Fabinho, Keita, Jota and Mane.
Only the last of those is likely to be fit in time to face City, a club that has won its last 13 games while conceding three goals. Then come fixtures against Leicester, Leipzig and Everton.
The question is how Liverpool came to be here. In Klopp’s first season at Anfield which ended with his team collapsing in a heap in the Europa League final against Sevilla, he was accused of burning his players out. They found it hard to adjust to the constant speed and pressing of his “heavy metal football”.
Five years on, it seems to be more an incessant stream of ill-fortune, culminating in Alisson Becker’s withdrawal on the eve of the Brighton match through illness.
However, what can be laid at Liverpool’s door is the speed with which they have moved to secure a replacement for Virgil van Dijk, who suffered his cruciate ligament injury in October.
Not until the last day of the January transfer window did they arrive in the shape of Ben Davies, from Preston who are mid-table in the Championship, and Ozan Kabak from Schalke, who are bottom of the Bundesliga with fewer points than Sheffield United.
Davies and Kabak are better than their teams but when asked if they could play together straight away, Klopp said “it would not be cool”. The climax of a Premier League season is no place for defenders to get to know each other – as Manchester United discovered when trying to integrate Patrice Evra and Nemanja Vidic when they signed the two in the 2006 January transfer window. The pair made their debut against Manchester City with Evra delivering a performance his manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, described as “a disaster”.
Liverpool’s sporting director, Michael Edwards, has been integral to the transformation of the club, and is, like Ferguson, suspicious of the January transfer window.
However, it is hard to escape the conclusion that had Liverpool moved more swiftly to bring in Davies and Kabak at the start of the window, Manchester City’s forward line might be facing two specialist central defenders rather than a makeshift screen.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3oMdnU0
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