With talent like the brilliant Keita added to his already gifted squad, The Vaunted One now MUST deliver a trophy

Jurgen Klopp and Jordan Henderson, one with fresh options and the other with talented new team-mates, positively salivated over the season ahead.

Nothing that followed would have dampened their enthusiasm for the campaign about to unfurl but there is one word that is reluctant to speak its name in these parts.

Klopp and his captain are certainly loathe to mention it.

Trophy. Any decent pot, the type last deposited in an Anfield six years ago. Trophy. Any decent pot, maybe a Premier League to go with Klopp’s 2012 Bundesliga trinket, the last time the Vaunted One (left) laid his hands on a meaningful jug. Since then? Heavy metal football without the silver.

All the fun of the fair but not even a goldfish to take home at the end of the day.

Well, if there was one thing to be gleaned from a typically joyous gallop past a West Ham side as insipidly grey as its kit, it is that if Liverpool go potless through this season, it will be a failure. A thoroughly entertaining, thrill-a-minute failure but a failure all the same. On Klopp’s part, on the players’ part.

This was a familiar, Jurgen-age Liverpool but minus one or two of the frailties undermined them.

The familiarity came in the form of Mo Salah’s scoring resumption, Sadio Mane’s dynamism, Roberto Firmino’s ravenous devotion to hard work, the James Milner renaissance, and the steady improvement of Andrew Robertson and Trent Alexander-arnold.

The unfamiliarity, the improvement, came in the driving, thoroughly modern performance of Naby Keita.

Fifteen minutes before the end of a contest that was finished when Mane tapped in Milner’s hook-back before half-time – doubling the lead earned by Salah’s similar tap-in from Robertson’s early cross – Keita found himself isolated in the leftshowcase that have