Jurgen Klopp pursues a drastic transformation and challenges Liverpool to see out season with winning run
Klopp has attempted to revitalise his players ahead of Saturday's Spurs clash by challenging them to win all of their remaining Premier League matches this season
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Your support makes all the difference.Jurgen Klopp hasn’t quite set down a challenge for his Liverpool players - but he has looked to set them off, to energise them again. The German has told his squad that they can go and win all remaining 14 league games to this season.
“Of course they know, I told them,” Klopp said at his Friday press conference ahead of the home match with Tottenham Hotspur. “They heard me. If they know and feel it we will see.”
“I don’t have to think that it is possible, it is possible. That is how football is. We have 14 games and it is possible to win 14 games... I know that it is possible. That keeps me up. As long as we can go for all…”
The German, however, did add a knowing caveat to that.
“Do what you want with this but don’t make it too big. It is only one information that I wanted to say. It is still possible. It is not that I talk about the other 13 games after Tottenham already.”
With Klopp again re-iterating that Liverpool “have to accept that we cannot be champions this year”, just as he did after last week’s deflating 2-0 defeat away to Hull City, the issue is not only that the side arguably require a run like that to save their season. It is also that it would be such a drastic transformation from the dreary last month.
With just one win in the last 10, and five games without a win both in the league and in all competitions - a 1-0 replay victory over League Two Plymouth Argyle the only match punctuating that - Klopp is actually on one of the worst runs of his managerial career. It sums up something of a curious dichotomy in that career, too.
While Klopp’s infectiously positive personality is capable of infusing players with the willingness to greatly overachieve, the flipside is what happens when the kind of momentum derived from that positivity is disrupted. Suddenly, the positivity is ineffective, and his teams go on long slumps. And, when things go bad, they really go bad, with little end in sight. It can be seen in the numbers.
In just over 15 years as a manager at Mainz, Borussia Dortmund and Liverpool, Klopp has gone on runs of seven, eight, nine and 17 games without a win. So, if Liverpool fail to win on Saturday, it will be the joint fifth worst run of his entire career.
That should mean an on-form and intense Tottenham are exactly the wrong opposition to face when you’re on that kind of form, but that raises another curious dichotomy of Klopp’s career, and one that their last positive performance - the 1-1 against Chelsea - only emphasised. His teams are often best against better sides, no matter their form. It was something that was even clear in that torrid last 2014-15 campaign at Dortmund, as they beat Arsenal just before beginning a seven-game winless league run involving six defeats, and ended the season knocking Pep Guardiola’s Bayern Munich out of the German cup semi-finals.
The reasons for that are probably inherently connected to why his sides seem to go down a whirlpool when it goes wrong, and are based on how he tactically arranges his teams, and motivates them. Fundamentally, a Klopp side are at an optimum when they can press and chase, and have something to react to. That of course tends to be the case against the better sides who will more willingly take the game to you. “You can’t chase and press a parked bus”, as one figure close to the Liverpool squad privately commented this week.
Once more teams rumble this, though, they all begin to set up in the same way. In that sense, it will be instructive to see whether Tottenham Hotspur sit as deep as Chelsea did at Anfield, given how durable Mauricio Pochettino’s defence is. It would appear the rational approach.
Klopp’s sides are often capable of overcoming that rationality with sheer emotion - or, if you like, aggressive energy - when at their best, but the problems start to arise when they begin to lose players and can’t play at that best. When they can no longer surprise sides, and no longer respond with the same electrical surge, problems start. That is also when bad runs start, and it seems to take Klopp a long while to figure his way out of it. It requires more than positivity.
That is arguably what we’ve seen in the last few weeks.
“We had the opposite of luck until now,” Klopp said on Friday. “If you have luck you don’t talk about it, if you don’t have luck you are not allowed to talk about it. Now between us here, we didn’t have luck. Injuries in the wrong moment, refs decisions in the wrong situations, offside or not, goals conceded, penalties not given and what not. At Dortmund it wasn’t that we got all the luck, it was just that situations worked out.”
Klopp scotched the usual idea that Liverpool lack leaders - “in my understanding actually, the manager has to be the main leader” - but it is undeniable they have lacked their main attackers, in what was already a heavily front-loaded team.
“At one point we lost the flow,” Klopp argued. This player been out, this player has lost rhythm, this player is ill.”
It all meant the team lost their rhythm. Sadio Mane wasn’t there to offer penetration, Philippe Coutinho wasn’t there to open things, Adam Lallana wasn’t able to press in the way he had been and Roberto Firmino wasn’t able to operate in the false-nine role that the rest of the players think he is far better at than anybody.
Klopp feels that will change, and it has already been heralded with what Coutinho - for one - is doing at Melwood.
“He has had a very good week in training, we have seen very good signs. It was the same thing with Sadio coming back from Africa. You saw the first half, you saw the second half and you think ‘OK, that is not how he usual is.’ You cannot know before. You have to take it. But he is another one who has had a really good week in training. That’s how it is.”
That’s not enough for Liverpool. They need to have a good game against Spurs on the Anfield pitch, to set up the run-in Klopp feels they are capable of.
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