History will remember Napoli’s 4-1 thrashing of Liverpool as the Champions League debut of Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, the brilliant Georgian winger whose name will soon be pronounced effortlessly by every football fan on the planet. But last week the big sensation was about pre-match favourites Liverpool, and how they have suddenly fallen to pieces.
The headlines focused on Jurgen Klopp saying afterwards that Liverpool needed to “reinvent” themselves, which seemed a radical thing to say eight matches into a new season. Reinvention suggests a total transformation of image and style - was Liverpool’s manager admitting that their methods have become exhausted, that it was over for his team in its current form, that these old dogs would have to learn new tricks to have any hope of keeping up?
More likely this was one of the occasional reminders Klopp gives that English is not actually his first language. In one press conference last season it became evident that when he heard people talk about “brain fog” he had always thought they were saying “brainfuck”. In his post-Napoli interview, he described the defeat as “a tough cookie to take”, when it sounded like he was grasping for something more like “bitter pill”.
What Klopp really meant was that Liverpool needed to rediscover and regenerate their core values, as he clarified in later comments that sounded less dramatic and received less attention. “It’s not that we have to invent a new kind of football... in this moment everyone would be happy if we could just play similar stuff to what we used to play... And tonight, that was the least compact performance I saw for a long, long time.”
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That night he did not seem confident of solving the problems in time to beat Wolves on Saturday. Then, on Thursday afternoon, the Queen died, and by Friday morning the weekend’s Premier League matches had been postponed, giving Klopp an unexpected training window to refamiliarise his players with what are supposed to be the fundamental principles of their game.
An insight into those principles was provided by Klopp’s assistant Pep Lijnders, whose book “Intensity” is a diary of the 21-22 season. Published six weeks ago when Liverpool were still thought to be good, it reads like a fragment of history that has been passed down from a vanished age.
The book has not been universally welcomed, with Dietmar Hamann claiming that its very existence was a portent of doom. “The alarm bells should have been ringing for @LFC fans when the current assistant manager wrote a book while still employed by the club. How he was allowed to do it I’m not too sure,” he tweeted after Napoli.
Hamann’s fears seem misplaced. Lijnders scrupulously avoids anything that might smell of scandal or even criticism. We learn that Klopp’s Christmas present to his coaching staff was to sponsor the planting of trees in Formby Nature Reserve, that Thiago “must have been born in a rondo” and so on. Such revelations seem unlikely to tear the dressing room apart.
Instead of scandal and banter we get copious notes on Liverpool’s training and matches. It turns out their game is all about counter-pressing, which everyone knows already. You push up, win the ball high and attack the centre with everything you have. The team should always be compact, with no more than 18 metres from front to back. “Play the first pass forward” - even if you give it away, you’ll have put it in a better area for winning it back. Try to steal the ball with every challenge: pressing should not be about simply funneling the opponent’s passes, you have to try every time to actually win it. Follow the press and chase the opposition from behind, and your press will succeed even against top sides.
The aim is to create “organised chaos”, where the opponent can’t keep up with the rapid-reaction football that Liverpool train for every day. As Lijnders’ title suggests, the key ingredient is intensity. “We tell the boys… Don’t speculate - GO. Don’t hesitate - GO. Don’t hope - GO. That’s why each game we have to ask ourselves the decisive question: how badly do we want it?”
Fast-forward to this season, which has seen Liverpool outrun and outsprinted by their opponent in nearly every game. How badly do we want it? Not as badly as the others do, it seems.
Why is this happening? There are some obviously significant details. They sold Sadio Mané and Darwin Nuñez has started badly. They’ve had a spate of injuries, including to key players like Thiago, Jordan Henderson, Diogo Jota and Joel Matip. But that doesn’t explain how they seem to have forgotten the most basic elements of their identity. “Follow and chase without compactness is like chasing rabbits”, Lijnders says. That’s what it looked like against Napoli.
Searching for answers, Lijnders will be sure to have consulted his vast mental database of inspirational sayings. He is always referring to the basketball coach John Wooden (“players with fight never lose a game, they just run out of time”) but he also quotes Cruyff (“the difference between good and bad is often only about five metres”), Shankly (“a football team is like a piano, you need eight men to carry it and three who can play the damn thing”), Einstein (“logic gets you from A to B, but imagination will get you everywhere”), FDR (“a smooth sea never created a good sailor”), etc.
The phrase “we don’t compare ourselves with anyone - the only worthwhile comparison lies in us yesterday versus us today” is unattributed, but sounds like Rule Four of 12 Rules for Life by Cristiano Ronaldo’s new acquaintance, Jordan Peterson. Also unattributed is a version of G Michael Hopf’s line on the cyclical nature of history, beloved of the online Right: “They say that tough times produce strong men, and strong men produce good times; good times produce weak men, and weak men produce tough times.”
Liverpool have had good times long enough that according to the formula they should now be in the time of weak men. It’s the old Rocky 3 problem. They became successful under Klopp playing an insurgent football which demanded that they put more energy into the game than the opponent. Klopp: “we don’t need to be the best team on this planet, we need to be the team who can beat the best team on this planet.”
But last season many important judges, including the likes of Arrigo Sacchi, were hailing Liverpool as the best team on the planet. When you are the best, it’s natural to wonder if you still must always be the hardest working. There’s a temptation to think: if we’re so good, then why can’t we relax and let our quality do the work?
And might these players be fed up of hearing the same messages? It’s an experience one can relate to after spending some hours with Lijnders’ book. There is a point at which the barrage of motivational quotes and the general air of relentless upbeat positivity and enthusiasm starts to become exhausting. Take the habit of referring to every single match as “a final”. Clearly, when every match is a final then the word has lost all meaning. It needs no repeating that Liverpool didn’t score in any of the three actual finals they played last season.
But then you look up from the page and remember that in football the words matter less than who is saying them and, most of all, how they are saying it. That’s how Bill Shankly was able to make the absurd claim that you needed three men to play the piano, and nobody thought to say that no you don’t, that pianos are never played by three men, that there isn’t even room for three men to sit at a piano. When Shankly spoke it wasn’t the words that registered with the audience so much as the Shankly growl, in which everything sounded true and wise.
A similar point is illustrated in Lijnders’ account of Klopp’s team-talk before last May’s Champions League final. “Anybody know what I said before the Tottenham final?” Klopp began. Nobody said anything. “It shows that it’s not that important,” Klopp said. “The only job I have in this moment is to transmit my conviction to you guys.” He may be repeating the same ideas his team has been hearing about for years, but Klopp has always had the gift of transmitting conviction. Sooner or later Liverpool’s players will get the message.
