WHEN Jurgen Klopp hauled off Mo Salah, with 20 minutes to go and a thrilling clash with Arsenal tied at 2-2, it felt like a watershed moment.
Since when did Klopp start making such flawed decisions?
Since when did the Liverpool boss start showing such caution, replacing Salah with Fabinho and redeploying Jordan Henderson to the right of midfield?
And since when could Salah — Liverpool’s supreme goalscorer, their Golden Boot winner and reigning Footballer of the Year — start being considered expendable when there was a crucial game to be won?
Klopp claimed he was still going for victory, despite that negative substitution — but Arsenal prevailed through a disputed penalty and went 14 points clear of their visitors.
Earlier on, the German had been too late in substituting the injured Trent Alexander-Arnold — and the world’s most controversial right-back was at fault for Arsenal’s second goal.
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Since when did Klopp start making glaring errors? Or has he often made them and Liverpool were just so good that we barely noticed?
In the last five seasons, Liverpool have won the title, reached three Champions League finals and collected every A-list trophy.
In three of the last four years, Klopp’s men have topped 90 points.
And in May, they were within six days of a Quadruple. But in the aftermath of that Emirates defeat, Klopp looked shattered and spent — bored of questions, bereft of answers, a man in need of a break.
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Out on the Emirates pitch, his team — judged against their own ridiculously-high standards — had lacked energy, inspiration and belief, a side in need of a reset.
The Liverpool boss groaned: “If we are winning, we have five million things to talk about. With losing, the conversations are a bit more rusty.”
His Reds have still only suffered four meaningful defeats in all competitions this calendar year.
But Klopp has been a relentless winner for most of his seven-year Anfield reign.
He regards any draws as defeats and is as tetchy as hell whenever Liverpool fail to win.
After just two wins from eight Premier League games, Klopp is sick of questions about the after-effects of his team’s narrow failure to complete a clean sweep last term.
But is this early-season run a prolonged hangover, or the start of Liverpool’s downfall?
With Klopp seemingly forlorn, Salah without a Prem goal since August and Virgil van Dijk having lost his forcefield of invincibility, it feels like the latter is a genuine possibility.
With a cheerleading troupe of former Liverpool players in the media, Klopp is usually immune to criticism — so it was interesting to hear his fellow German Didi Hamann delivering an intelligent assessment and questioning the manager’s long-term future on talkSPORT yesterday.
If Klopp feels he can no longer compete with Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City, just as he could no longer compete with Guardiola’s Bayern Munich while at Borussia Dortmund, could he walk?
Liverpool’s starting XI on Sunday at the Emirates was, on average, 3.5 years older than that of Mikel Arteta’s vibrant Arsenal.
It is not that Liverpool have stagnated — Diogo Jota, Thiago Alcantara, Luis Diaz, Darwin Nunez, Ibrahima Konate and Fabio Carvalho have all joined since the 2019-2020 title success.
But there are too many key players past their 30th birthdays, including Liverpool’s best defender, Van Dijk, and most potent forward, Salah.
They lack a creative attacking midfield spark — which may be Carvalho in the long run.
And Liverpool just keep conceding early goals. For so long the Premier League’s most industrious team, Klopp’s men are no longer turning up for work on time.
Klopp has suffered one previous crisis, two seasons ago, but that was because all his senior centre-backs had suffered long-term injuries.
This season, there are no such obvious excuses. There have been injuries but Liverpool’s starting line-up has rarely looked weak.
In that Emirates press conference, Klopp did not have any convincing remedy for Liverpool’s slump — blaming individual errors, which used to be so rare.
He said: “We work on solutions and, against Arsenal, I saw some of them.
“But when you then knock down with your backside what you built with your hands, that is really not helpful.”
Asked whether he had deeper concerns about his team’s form, Klopp replied: “Yes, of course I am not happy. How can I be?
“Your colleague told me that he knows me just being happy all the time and making jokes.
“I’m not sure exactly which Jurgen Klopp he knows — but we are not in a mood for jokes.”
At the end of his media duties, Klopp was asked why he substituted Salah and he winced and reprimanded his press officer for allowing that one final question.
He replied that Liverpool needed to ‘defend at a high level’, and that Salah had ‘put in a real shift’ but that he felt Henderson could do a better defensive job on the right.
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It sounded as if Klopp had lost a little faith in Salah; that he had lost his supreme belief in the ability of his ‘mentality monsters’ to seize every opponent by the throat. And it looked as though Klopp was tired and older — that he had lost his sparkle, his mojo.
When City go to Anfield on Sunday, we will discover whether it was all just a trick of the light.
Source: Soccer - thesun.co.uk
