Jurgen Klopp not about to abandon Liverpool principles despite tough Arsenal test

Jurgen Klopp brings up his seventh anniversary at Anfield this weekend. It might not be a happy one. Liverpool have made their worst start to a season in his reign and, with Arsenal and Manchester City next, it could get worse. He admits opponents have figured Liverpool out: but not in the last couple of months. Years ago, in fact.

Perhaps it was before Liverpool won the 2019 Champions League, or won 26 of their first 27 games as they went on to secure 99 points in the following season’s Premier League. Certainly before they threatened to claim an unprecedented quadruple last season. Knowing what Liverpool do, Klopp argues, is not the same as being able to stop them.

“Teams worked out how you can play against us when we are not at our best,” he readily admitted. “Other teams have worked out how to play against us for years but it still didn’t work out for them because we were exceptional in the things we did.”

There is a bullishness to it, a belief in the blueprint that has been undented by the lows the last few games have contained. Yet there is also the sense that Kloppball was never a safety-first approach. In a game of risk and reward, Liverpool were rewarded for their boldness. Their consistency was extraordinary considering what the gambles entailed. This year, especially away at Napoli and in the first 20 minutes against Brighton, the system broke down and they looked shambolic. “All of a sudden, a well-drilled team didn’t work together any more,” Klopp said. None of which bodes well for a meeting with an Arsenal side who have the fluency and cohesion Liverpool used to exhibit.

All of which was always the danger. “In our best games I could show you the parts where we could have had problems: here, here, here,” Klopp rationalised. “But we didn’t because we put so much pressure on the opposition that they couldn’t find these spaces, that’s the risk you take. In the moments when you don’t play on your top [level], these gaps are still there, and they play the pass through and it looks like they know how to play against us.”

In the process, Trent Alexander-Arnold became a scapegoat for the wider world, seemingly out of position when caught upfield. “The way we defended, you need to be brave,” Klopp explained. “We jump with our full-backs to the full-backs of other team, and it was great when we win the ball and put them under pressure. But when we are not in the right moment they just pass past our full-back and they are not in their position in the back line and you all say: ‘You cannot defend like that.’ Oh yes you can: we did it for 200 games.” That way, high pressing, with a high defensive line and often 4-3-3, is imperfect but invariably his way. “It was always clear in any system we play, there is no system in the world with no weakness: five at the back, four, three, no one,” he added, though a no-man defence may be a risk too far for him. “It is all about how we perform.”

Even as he had swapped formation in midweek against Rangers, to a 4-2-3-1 he described as 4-4-2, he felt unrepentant, unchanging. Seven years on, Klopp is sticking with the same formula. Upon his unveiling, he declared he wanted to make Liverpool the hardest team in the world to beat; at times in his reign, they have been.

Not this season, even if a tally of two defeats is actually respectable. The problems have nevertheless felt deeper. Klopp’s response this week when told his team had been criticised was to interject: “Rightly so.” Now the aim is to become unpleasant opponents. “We have to defend the s**t out of everybody we face,” he said. As each game lends itself to different conclusions, Klopp is not getting carried away by intermittent evidence of improvement.

“We need consistency, and for consistency we need to defend the rubbish out of everybody and that is what we have to do,” he said. “I am not interested in this short-term diagnosis: ‘That was good, that was bad.’ We have to be good until we are outstanding.”

Which he thinks Arsenal are. Liverpool faced Arsenal four times last season, never conceding and scoring eight goals. Now his side may go to the Emirates Stadium on Sunday as underdogs. Klopp is an admirer of Arsenal. He was an early fan of Gabriel Martinelli – “I was excited about him and he became the player I expected him to be,” he said – and tried to recruit Martin Odegaard when he was 15, only for the in-demand Norwegian to prefer Real Madrid. Now each is realising his potential.

Meanwhile, Gabriel Jesus’s fondness for pressing made him a Klopp-style player, though he reasoned City would not have sold him to Liverpool, whereas they could let him go to London. “The distance was big enough, geographically,” he said. The distance between Liverpool and Arsenal last season was 23 points; now it is 11, and with Liverpool trailing. At the moment, the sense is that, if there is a team that opponents have not worked out how to play against, it is the Gunners.