City mauling didn’t really matter

YOU have to have a certain amount of sympathy for Geoff Shreeves. Well we do anyway having to regularly speak to managers after games ourselves as part of our work. We’ve been that solider. In that post-match situation you’re genuinely not there to piss anybody off, but sometimes it does happen. You phrase a question clumsily. You misread a mood. You mishear a reply.

We probably shouldn’t overstate it either. It rarely gets fractious or anything close and, despite all the online chatter about it, the clash of Shreeves and Jürgen Kloop was hardly the rumble in the jungle either. It wasn’t even Martin O’Neill versus Tony O’Donoghue. It did, though, show a side of Klopp that we rarely get to see. He wasn’t one bit happy to see his men routed in their first game as Premier League champions and especially not by their main rivals for the title. Nor would you expect him to be.

That said the vast majority of Liverpool fans reacted with a shrug to the events of last Thursday evening. It seemed fairly inevitable after a week of celebrations – the inference of which led to those semi-spiky exchanges between Klopp and the man from Sky – and besides the title is won. There’s nothing left to play for.

Yeah there’s points records to be aimed at, a further chance to etch this season in history, but really .... who cares? The title is the thing everyone wanted. The title has been achieved. If Liverpool ease off from here until the end of the season what harm? They won’t, of course, Klopp won’t allow it and he’s right – but maybe not for the reasons you might think. It’s not necessarily about keeping standards up for the sake of keeping standards high, it’s more so to do with his efforts to integrate young players into the side a little more with the remaining games of the season. These young guys – the Neco Williamses and Harvey Elliotts – need to know what it’s really like to play for Liverpool, not what it’s like to play in a glorified friendly to round out the season. Points tallies don’t really matter in and of themselves, consequently Curtis Jones’ goal on Sunday evening against Aston Villa was worth much more to Liverpool than the three points on offer.