Klopp’s Achilles heel is lousy offside trap
Reds lucky to escape as City fail to capitalise on defensive blunders
RIGHT until the final seconds, an acute sense of jeopardy remained. Rarely has there been a Premier League game on which so much seemed to hang with so much of the season still left to play.
This was early April yet it felt like the end of May. Everything on the line. From that point of view, it was a quite remarkable afternoon.
As we reached the final 15 or 20 minutes of the game, we waited for that moment that often comes in games like this. That moment when both coaches and both teams subconsciously settle for what they have. Take a point. Go home and get ready to start again next week.
It happens all the time but it did not happen here. There was not even a sniff of it. The substitutions that were made all reflected that. No thought of sending on an extra defender to try to shut the game down. Instead millions of pounds of attacking talent entered the fray — Jack Grealish, Riyad Mahrez, Roberto Firmino, Luis Diaz.
That says everything about the way these two teams approach the subject of winning games: if you go down, then you go down swinging.
In the end, it could have been Liverpool on the canvas. Jurgen Klopp’s team were better in the second half. Gone was the chaos of their first-half football. Still, though, they gave up the ball one time too many deep in stoppage time and in an instant Mahrez was away and clear at the other end.
It had been a pattern of the game: Liverpool’s defence running in sand in the wake of City forwards that had breached what had been not so much an offside trap but an open door flapping in a spring wind.
Mahrez should have scored and had he done so, the game would have been City’s and perhaps the title, too. City have seven games to play and it would have been a lot to expect them to lose two of them.
But the Algerian’s chipped shot was executed poorly and finally the referee’s whistle took the pressure from the grip City held around Liverpool’s throats.
There was much to like about