Klopp: I had no doubts over Salah as he got up to speed
“THE body is back,” Jurgen Klopp would say like a detective dreaming of the dark mystery he could never solve, though it seems instead he may have cracked the missing persons case of Mohamed Salah, whose subtle sort of revival has involved six goals in seven games since his position was switched from the wing to centre forward.
The riddle for Klopp in Paris is to decide whether he continues with Salah in the same role against an opponent Liverpool have already beaten this season, albeit one that in the German’s opinion is the “favourite” to win the Champions League even though they might be eliminated should they lose again here.
Listen closely and it sounds as though he might revert to the 4-3-3 formation that saw the French champions barraged in periods at Anfield in September.
His thinking appears to relate to the threat of Kylian Mbappe, the World Cup-winning teenager whose jet-heels invites new language and talk of the impossible.
Klopp described him as “undefendable”.
Klopp had also suggested that Liverpool’s players will have to run further than PSG’s. In real football terms, this translates as a test of endurance for a midfield who will have to be at their most athletic and alert to hole in the gaps which could afford service to Mbappe.
“He is quicker than 97% of all the other players in the world,” Klopp estimated.
It is a challenge to discuss this match — or any match involving PSG — without mentioning finance, and this reduces the discussion around the potential of the sporting spectacle. There can be few encounters in world football where so much pace will be visible on the same pitch.
Perhaps some of Klopp’s players are in the other three per cent he speaks of gauging Mbappe’s menace. Who would win in a race between Sadio Mane, Virgil van Dijk and, of course, Salah?
It became clear that Klopp has thought hard about how to get his leading scorer back up to speed since May’s Champions League final.
Suggesting Salah had physically returned to his best revealed that he believes the Egyptian is getting closer to where he was before Sergio Ramos dragged him down in Kiev.
He related the early season sluggishness of the individual to the collective of Real Madrid, a team that has gone through a World Cup, a manager and five La Liga defeats since beating Liverpool in Ukraine.
Much has been made about the manner of Liverpool’s league form, where they remain unbeaten without producing the sort of performances which saw good teams blown away in previous campaigns.
Klopp empathises with his players — especially those who went to Russia — and it sounds as though he has learned from his own mistakes from the past, when he did not tailor his demands according to the conditions of the footballers. It was, after all, the post-World Cup season of 2014-15 where Borussia Dortmund spent Christmas in the Bundesliga relegation zone.
Klopp tends not to extend praise in places where others lather it so thickly, but he thought it was time to be bold about Salah’s form, which has coincided with the introduction of Xherdan Shaqiri as a fourth member of the Liverpool attack.
“The body is back,” he assessed enthusiastically. What followed would be greeted as an excuse if the player in question was struggling but instead felt like more of an explanation because this one is doing better than he was.
“We had the longest season of all the teams,” Klopp reasoned. “The World Cup ended a little bit earlier for Mo, but he went with being 94 or 95% fit because of the shoulder injury.
“He had no problem with the shoulder anymore, but being healthy does not mean you are 100%. He then had two weeks off. That is nothing. That is exactly the time the body needs to calm down.
“The first three weeks of holiday for a footballer you do not even feel rest. It is just what you need. You do not sleep longer, you still have the season in your legs and mind. It was the same for Mo and many others. Then the pre-season starts again…
“He tried everything. The only thing was his body needed time to adapt. Still a world-class player, still a threat in a game, but in the scoring situations not the same calmness, coolness.
“People need time. We don’t give them time because we don’t have the time. The season starts: be ready.
“But not for one second was he in doubt and I was not in doubt. Nobody here was in doubt.”
There had been some doubt as to the availability of key players up until yesterday evening.
Mbappe and Neymar were injured for France and Brazil on international duty but trained, while it emerged on Monday that Mane had been ill.
There was a developing sense that it was all part of a trick, though Klopp was planning for Mbappe and Neymar while Thomas Tuchel was convinced Mane would feature.
Tuchel knows that should he lose and Napoli beat Red Star Belgrade in Italy, the review that comes for him at the end of the season will be dreadful in Europe because his team will have been knocked out at the group stage of the competition his employers are desperate to win. This makes Liverpool’s task much harder.
“Paris are a real package,” Klopp concluded. “You have to play or you will never get rid of the pressure. In the home game, we did that. We did not score our goals from counter-attacking. We had dominant phases and that is what we need to do again.”