Sunday Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Klopp averts a crisis as Coutinho payback begins
IT will soon be two years since Jurgen Klopp laughed his way into Liverpool lives.
There have been some landmark victories, but few can have been as significant as this.
Not in the scale of its achievement because this Leicester team is a ghost of its title-winning past.
Not in what it means to those blue-chip others with top-end business on their agenda.
Not in its style, not in its substance, not in any sort of ominous excellence whatsoever.
But significant in what it averted.
Had Liverpool’s collapse from two dominant positions in this game been completed, Klopp would have had to deal with the questions about the defensive AND mental strength of this team.
Questions that, most crucially, would have come from himself.
No matter how this win was achieved – and the irony of Simon Mignolet somehow saving the day is stark – it’s given Klopp a psychological breather.
No wonder – when Mo Salah, Philippe Coutinho and Jordan Henderson scored – Klopp jabbed the air as though he was pummelling an imaginary critic.
And after Liverpool hung on, Klopp can now turn up for work, again armed with the positives he likes to dwell on, positives that were beginning to look like driftwood on the Mersey. The main positive plank was Coutinho. As Klopp fist-pumped, John W Henry was probably high-fiving himself in Boston, saluting his own decisiveness.
A source of Klopp’s relative ill-humour at times must have been the Coutinho saga.
Every manager trots out the trite togetherness line, but Klopp seems even more evangelical than most about team ethic.
Coutinho, now fully recovered from his back injury, wanted to pursue his individual ambitions.
Fully understandable, but contrary to Klopp’s mantra.
Yet, for two reasons, he had to swallow the pill of Coutinho’s head and heart being turned. The stubborn, principled stance of the owners and the quality of the Brazilian. Sift through this Liverpool squad and he is the nugget that sparkles brightest. His are the feet that dance fastest, his is the brain that operates sharpest, his is the dead-ball strike that flies sweetest.
Everything about his assist for Salah’s surprisingly well-executed header was done with decisive swiftness.
From a short backlift, the cross fizzed, dipped and curled at pace, wiping out defensive capabilities.
His free-kick might have taken a kiss off Harry Maguire’s head, but that is his speciality range.
And it was only a short and simple pass early in the breakaway move that led to Henderson’s goal – but short and simple is under-rated. Twice, though, a two-goal lead was halved and, at the centre of it, was Mignolet.
There is little doubt where the seeds of Liverpool’s defensive dithering lie – with the goalkeeper. Or rather with the goalkeeping situation.
There is probably no other position on the pitch where trust can underpin performance.
Has Mignolet ever really been trusted? By Klopp? By an assortment of defenders?
They are rhetorical questions. Shinji Okazaki’s beastly-looking goal was a short essay on Mignolet’s strengths and weaknesses. Strong enough to jab a Jamie Vardy header into the happy clappers, weak enough to allow himself to be impeded as he went to deal with a routine corner.
And when you feel as though you can’t catch a break, you end up palming a Demarai Gray shot on to Vardy’s forehead and then only glancing a clearance kick and following through to upend Vardy.
The only shock was that when Mignolet parried Vardy’s spot-kick, no one scored. Yet there was nothing lucky about this win. Neither was there anything overly impressive, anything that suggested title-challenge.
But Klopp needed this like he has needed few other wins in two years. Don’t let him tell you otherwise.
Klopp’s been given
a psychological breather, no matter how Liverpool won