Liverpool, Leicester and a tale of two teams learning on the job
Many of Jurgen Klopp's Liverpool players, just like their Leicester counterparts, have been in pole position to win a title despite having no previous experience of doing so together
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Your support makes all the difference.For all the championship trophies at Anfield, and all of the vast experience of victory they can lean on from so many former players, it is Wednesday’s visitors that could actually tell them most about what they’re about to go through.
That is because many of these Leicester City players, just like their Liverpool counterparts, have been in pole position to win a title despite having no previous experience of doing so together.
And while there is an obvious difference between an underdog going for its first league win, and one of the most successful clubs going for their first in 29 years, the swells of emotion created around their stadiums will be similar. Liverpool, just like Leicester three seasons ago, are going to have to deal with that. Liverpool, just like Leicester, are going to have to deal with the unique pressure that comes with being leaders but leaders still seen as somewhat defying the odds.
Liverpool, just like Leicester, are going to have to learn on the job.
Because, unlike so many Anfield title winners between those glory years of 1963 to 1990, they don’t have what former champion Jim Beglin has described to The Independent as that proven experience of “maintaining a focus”.
“There was a great concentration in our [1984] team,” Beglin said. “We had that belief we’d pull through, because we’d been through it.”
They’d been through the distinctly changing rhythms of a title challenge. “Just keep doing what we do and it’ll happen again,” was the message.
A proper title challenge, after all, often feels like it goes in three distinctive stages.
The first is the foundation. It is the longest stage, lasting around half the season, and is about getting those early wins under your belt without getting ahead of yourself. Because, at that stage, it’s really too early for any deeper weight of meaning. This is why it can often feel much freer. For previous champions, this stage can be enough to win the title in itself. For new challengers, like Leicester and Liverpool now, it is what causes all the excitement and emotion to build.
The second part is the grind. A team is over the halfway mark and very consciously talked about as a potential winner, with that thereafter transforming the complexion of every fixture. You’re no longer playing matches, but doing the job.
The third, then, is the run-in. That’s where everything ratchets up.
And games like this will still dictate whether Liverpool get that far, because they have very definitely entered the second stage now.
They are at the point where every game is a challenge rather than an opportunity. Like this against Leicester. A fixture that in the freewheeling first half of the season would have seemed a winnable match against an inconsistent mid-table team now seems an awkward encounter with one of the Premier League’s top-half teams, where the qualities of their better players feel all the more dangerous.
It was in that context Jurgen Klopp made such a point of mentioning Jamie Vardy’s record against Liverpool, making Virgil van Dijk’s availability all the more important (/sport/football/premier-league/liverpool-virgil-van-dijk-mohamed-salah-table-manchester-city-title-race-epl-a8720216.html). It was indeed Vardy’s goals against Liverpool at around this point in the 2015-16 season that really consolidated the belief that Leicester could see it through.
“Jamie’s best one against us was the one at Leicester the year they were champions,” Klopp said. “He’s a fantastic player.”
That supremely professional 2-0 win was also notable because it came after another decision that helped emphasise the separation of these stages: a rare mid-season break.
So many at Leicester cite the week off that Claudio Ranieri gave them – just after what could have been a morale-sapping late 2-1 defeat to Arsenal – as key to fortifying the side for the run-in.
“It worked out perfectly,” Vardy said at the end of the season. “The gaffer gave us a week off to completely forget about everything and recharge the batteries. We all ventured off, quite a few of us went to Dubai together as a team, and I think that moment, for him to even think about doing that, showed what he’d thought of us as a team and how much work we’d already put in, so to get those batteries recharged for that week and come back fighting stronger was a massive part.
“It was a great idea.”
Many spoke of how it made them forget about the defeat to Arsenal, and all the pressure of where they were, and settled them into the right frame of mind.
Liverpool similarly went to Dubai this week, although for an organised team break, that gave Klopp a rare chance to do real training-ground work.
“Game-train-game-train is the best of course but having a proper week for football training is really what a manager wants to have,” the German said on Tuesday. “We don’t have that often enough in modern football, that’s the truth. We have pre-season and then three or four weeks over the year when you have a full week to train and not only to recover and prepare for the next opponent.”
And there was the kicker.
“There you can be outside more so it was good for the body and good for the soul.”
It was certainly good for Leicester. They came back from Dubai and, with everyone now treating them like title challengers, responded like champions. They got through the grind that the second stage of a race is, and their results reflected that with numerous 1-0 wins.
“Basically, it was crunch time,” Wes Morgan says in Jonathan Northcroft’s book ‘Fearless’. “There was more and more focus on: ‘Right are they going to slip up? Is this the game where they slip up?’ We didn’t listen. 1-0s are the best. 1-0: it really sticks the fingers up to the opposition a little bit.”
“We had five or six games where we proper grinded it out and that was great,” Kasper Schmeichel added.
This Liverpool have much more variety to their game than that Leicester side, and have proven they can prevail through narrow games, but they have not yet proven they can come through this second stage of a challenge.
“We must enjoy the ride,” Klopp told the BBC, with a caveat. “But it’s intense.”
And set to get more intense still. Leicester could tell them that, and their meeting could prove telling.
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