Jurgen Klopp Must Find Consistency or Liverpool Will Continue to Flounder

It didn’t take long for the optimism Liverpool might have felt after the opening weekend of the season to fade.

It could be argued that the Reds were unlucky to be beaten at Burnley, that when you have 26 shots to three you’re unlikely to lose the game, but the fact is that they lost, and worse, it felt like they had lost from the moment Andre Gray added the second eight minutes before half-time.

And while it might have gone down in history as the first game lost by a side in the Premier League having had at least 80 per cent possession, it’s still not the sort of result a side with ambitions of mounting a title challenge can afford.

In light of what followed, doubts emerged about the 4-3 victory away to Arsenal on the opening weekend. How good had Liverpool actually been? Yes, there was a stunning 20-minute spell after half-time when the Gunners wilted against the Reds pace (although the third goal, Philippe Coutinho’s second, was atypical—we’ll return to that), but in the first half the Reds had been poor and then stuttered late on.

WyScout / Karl Matchett

After the game, Klopp said of his team's first-half display that they “did it at 50 per cent of being convinced about what we had to do.” His players, in a big game, couldn’t quite persuade themselves to press as high as he wanted them to press. In a big game, there lingered an innate sense of caution, a fear of leaving space behind them.

The result was that the press wasn’t compact enough, and Arsenal picked their way through the spaces. Klopp resolved that at half-time, and the problem late on—as he admitted—was an element of complacency after the fourth goal had gone in.

It’s easy to see why there was such positivity after that game. Liverpool had been brilliant for a spell, and the times when they were poor were fixable. What happened at Burnley is more concerning.

Klopp’s preferred tactical style is high-tempo pressing—he may have come to regret using the phrase "heavy metal football," but the term has stuck because it is so apt. It’s about constant energy and verticality, running more than the opposition and fighting harder. That’s how Liverpool bullied Villarreal and overwhelmed Borussia Dortmund last season.

Yet the suggestion this season is that there may be restraint, that Liverpool’s play will be at least partly about possession. The Burnley game was always likely to be an outlier. Sean Dyche’s side sit deep, keep that back four narrow and are happy to let the opposition have the ball. But what’s telling is certain aspects of the match at Arsenal.

Take that third goal. Although the coup de grace was a direct run from Nathaniel Clyne and a cross for Coutinho arriving at pace in the box, the lead-up to that was far less typical. Liverpool worked the ball back and forth across the pitch in a skein of 19 passes in the buildup.

It was a lovely goal and, at the time, it was possible to see it in isolation. Liverpool were confident, Arsenal dropped off, and they picked their way through. But the fact that it was followed within a week by a performance in which they had 80 per cent possession suggests it was by design, that Klopp wants his team to hold possession longer.

In itself, that’s reasonable: If a side can both hold possession and play hard-pressing football at high tempo, it will excel—it was the capacity to do both that marked out Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona. The problem is that the number of players who can do both is limited.

Against Burnley, Liverpool didn’t have the guile to unlock the opposition. Of those 26 shots, 18 were from outside the box, per WhoScored.com. Only five were on target. Burnley sat too deep and remained too compact for Liverpool to pass their way through or behind them.

So how do you break down a defence like that? The easiest way would be to get the ball in wide areas and get crosses into the box. Burnley defended narrowly, largely surrendering the flanks. But that requires a centre-forward who is good in the air. Robert Firmino won only one aerial duel all game.

On the weekend they sold him to Crystal Palace, Liverpool could have done with Christian Benteke. But then the Belgium international offers far less in other spheres than Firmino.

This is the nature of football, one of the reasons it retains its capacity to enthral: It can be played in so many different ways that there’s always going to be an element of short-blanket syndrome; you’re always going to want one attribute more.

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But perhaps the biggest problem for Liverpool on Saturday—and this again feels paradoxical—is that, in a performance in which they had 80 per cent of the ball, their passing wasn’t quite good enough.

Jordan Henderson is a fine footballer. He works exceptionally hard and, as anybody who saw him grow up at Sunderland could attest, he has a prodigious capacity to work on his weaknesses. But he is not Sergio Busquets.

Liverpool’s switch from a 4-2-3-1 to an aggressive 4-3-3 this season hasn’t helped him. Henderson seems to need a true holder alongside him, somebody with an innate positional awareness to fill the gaps.

His best performances at Liverpool have probably come alongside Lucas Leiva. At Sunderland, he arguably played his best football as a narrow right-sided player, with David Meyler and Lee Cattermole holding. He’s a shuttler, somebody who plugs gaps, works up and down and is a decent passer and crosser.

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Whenever he has been asked to perform the holding role, though, he has struggled. That was true for England at the 2014 FIFA World Cup, and it has been true so far this season. Worse, coming deep to receive possession between the two centre-backs, he always looked uneasy.

It may be that Emre Can slots into that position eventually, and Henderson replaces either Adam Lallana or Georginio Wijnaldum as one of the flanking players in the 4-3-3.

Henderson finished Saturday with a 91.7 per cent pass-completion rate, but that only goes to demonstrate the limits of statistics. He had 148 touches, 37 more than any other Liverpool player, but too many of them were a fraction too slow, a fraction misplaced. Maybe that’s unfair on Henderson, because this was a collective failure—but he was at the heart of it.

What that means for Liverpool is less clear. Last season was characterised by moments of brilliance interspersed with extreme ordinariness and defensive calamity, and already that appears to be the pattern this season.

Klopp is still building, but 10 months after his arrival, it’s probably about time some semblance of consistency began to be seen.

*All quotes and information obtained firsthand unless otherwise indicated.