What happens to Klopp’s Liverpool: the keys to a team that surprises with its irregular start

When the first month of the European season has just ended, talking about a crisis can be rushed. Still, it’s hard to deny it Liverpool’s first steps were not solid. The 4-1 suffered Wednesday against Napoli at the debut in the league Champions League trigger the alarms, to the point that Jurgen Klopp he recognized that his team needed to reinvent itself. With a lot of material to do this, it will be necessary to see how long it will take to achieve it.

The numbers of these first weeks of competition show that the networks they are having an irregular walk. Of their eight fights in all competitions, they have won three, draws and lost two. Last season, in which they were second in the Champions League and Premier League and champions of the FA Cup and English League Cup, they only lost four of the 63 they played: two in the Premier League (3-2 against West Ham United and 1-0 against Leicester City) and two in the Champions League (1-0 against Inter in the round of 16 revenge – they had won 2-0 in the first leg – and 1-0 with Real Madrid in the final).

But if the setback against Manchester United or the draw with the modest Crystal Palace had produced calls to attention, the beating that the city team of the Beatles endorsed at the Diego Armando Maradona stadium in Naples in a tournament in which the last year they had won all six of their group stage games it was a slap that no one could ignore.

“It was the least compact performance I’ve seen in a long, long time. It’s a hard pill to swallow, but we’ll make it. We lack a lot of things. We have to find a solution to be better. We have to reinvent ourselves. “Klopp sentenced after the worst defeat suffered by Liverpool in the main club tournament of the Old Continent in more than half a century. Only once had he been beaten by a greater difference: On 7 December 1966, Ajax won 5-1 at the Olympic Stadium in Amsterdam in the first leg of one of the keys to the second round of the European Cup.

The German manager didn’t stop at a general overview, but detailed his team’s weakest points in a match in which he went on hiatus and lost by three goals. “We weren’t present in the defensive or offensive phase. We play too much lying down. They converted one penalty and missed another, but the next two goals were served on a plate. We should have defended ourselves better. When we were 3-0, we had chances, but we were never in the game. Until Thiago entered the field, I don’t remember a single pressure well doneHe acknowledged.

Similarly, one of the men with a long career in Liverpool, Andrew Robertson, put it: “We can’t come to a field like this and not be compact. They’ve had many occasions where they’ve had time to run behind us and cause us trouble. They were by far the best team. It’s like they have one more man. We deserve this result “.

The diagnosis seems clear. The question now is how Klopp will be able to forge that reconstruction. For now he has to do it with the players he has, because last week he closed a transfer market in which the club lost one of the key players of the last five years, the Senegalese Sadio Mané (he left for Bayern Munich); He broke the piggy bank by including Uruguayan Darwin Núñez as a substitute (he paid € 100m to Benfica) and made no other strong moves.

The absence of Manè, scorer of 120 goals and responsible for 49 assists in 269 games played in six seasons, is not easy to cover. Núñez has not yet earned a place and, as if that weren’t enough, he had to serve three dates of disqualification in the Premier for an expulsion in the second round against Crystal Palace. The Brazilian Roberto Firmino did not respond and many times the Egyptian Mohamed Salah, usually right winger, had to referee as a center forward, a position in which he does not perform very well.

In the middle, a fundamental sector in the game of a team that tends to suffocate the opponents with incessant pressure, there are also problems. Partly due to a cataract of wounds: Jordan Henderson, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Curtis Jones and Naby Keita of Guinea are all out of action and Thiago Alcantara is returning from a hamstring strain that caused him to miss five games. The work for the Brazilian Fabinho is therefore uphill, still in the axis of the pitch. It will be necessary to see what his compatriot Arthur, who arrived from Juventus last week, can give.

There are also a lot of difficulties in the last row, as Klopp and Robertson acknowledged, and injuries affect that too. Frenchman Ibrahima Konaté suffered a blow to the right knee in the last pre-season friendly and has not been able to play since. And the Cameroonian Joel Matip returns after almost a month of absence. Without his usual defending buddies, Dutchman Virgil van Dijk looked more vulnerable than usual. And his partner on Wednesday in Naples, Joe Gomez, had a job to forget.

In the first part of the season with a very tight schedule due to the World Cup at the end of the year in Qatar, the networks they will have the chance to start straightening the path (or twist it even more) on Saturday at Anfield against Wolverhampton in the Premier League. And three days later they will have to take the field again at home, against Ajax for the Champions League.

After the defeat to Napoli, Klopp was asked if he feared the same fate as compatriot Thomas Tuchel, sacked Wednesday from Chelsea after losing on his Champions League debut against Dinamo Zagreb. “The truth is, no,” he replied. Our owners are quite calm and expect me to fix the situation and don’t think anyone else will.