Don’t shoot Jurgen Klopp for letting Mamadou Sakho leave on loan

If this is the point in the season when Jurgen Klopp begins to think seriously about his summer transfer strategy – not least the considerable task of sorting out that pesky defence – then the past few weeks will likely have brought as much confusion as clarity.

Liverpool might have edged past Stoke on Saturday but it was little thanks to their perennially shaky backline, who would have conceded rather more goals than they did were it not for the heroics of Simon Mignolet (you read that sentence right – do not adjust your set). Any discussion of Liverpool's defence is by now well-trodden ground, but it is by far the most benevolent of the Premier League’s top six, having overseen just a single clean sheet since the start of 2017. So it was no surprise at the Britannia when a chaotic first half for Klopp’s backline concluded with Jon Walters sauntering into the six-yard box, not a marker in sight, to head home his customary goal against the Merseysiders.

The freewheeling ease of Walters’ goal came to mind two days later, when Arsenal’s repeated attempts to breach Crystal Palace’s defence were repelled by Sam Allardyce’s battle-hardened gang of clean-sheet fetishists, led with murderous intent by a certain Liverpool employee.

Mamadou Sakho, who was ostracised and ousted by Klopp after various breaches of club discipline, joined a Palace side that was in dire straits, conceding goals at the rate of roughly two a game and looking verily doomed. Since coming into the side he has been sensational, Palace having won five in six and marching steadily towards midtable safety, four clean sheets thrown in for good measure.

One notable moment in Monday night’s game came when Sakho locked horns with Olivier Giroud, Arsenal’s brick outhouse of a target man, inside the penalty area. The French defender left his countryman in a crumpled heap, beaten for strength, aggression and desire, appealing in vain for a penalty he didn’t deserve.

It was a moment that contrasted starkly to the freedom given to Walters by his former team-mates on Saturday, and indeed that given to strikers of similar stature over recent months. Benik Afobe, Shane Long, Fernando Llorente, Mikhail Antonio, Sam Vokes and Salomon Rondon have all scored against Liverpool in the time since Sakho last kicked a ball for the club – all centre-forwards who are very much the proverbial “handful”, even if they don’t have a pinch of elite talent between them.

Sakho had already attained cult-hero status among a sizeable faction of Liverpool fans before his exile, so his sparkling form since joining Palace has merely loudened the debate about Klopp’s decision to swing the axe. That his notional berth on the left side of defence has been largely taken by Lucas Leiva – a repurposed midfielder who has looked exactly that – or Ragnar Klavan – an ageing, cut-price signing who has, well, looked exactly that – has hardly helped Klopp’s cause.

The fact that Sakho was dispensed with for disciplinary rather than footballing reasons muddies the debate a bit, although whether it should do is another question. Sporting talent is only one contributing factor towards an effective team; if Klopp feels Sakho was a harmful influence then who’s to say he wasn’t bang on in that judgment? By all accounts, the club want rid of the defender for good and the fact that their stance has not changed in the wake of recent events is telling – although you’d like to think they might keep an open mind.

Nor is it a given that Sakho’s recent excellence would have been straightforwardly transplanted into Liverpool’s defence if only he had been a part of it. Indeed, the argument that Sakho’s absence could have cost Liverpool a title challenge is an odd one, given how he was a mainstay of the bungling backline of 2013/14 that is widely regarded to have cost Liverpool the title.

Sakho has had some very good games for Liverpool but he’s had some very bad ones too; that, three years in to his Anfield career, he divides opinion as starkly as he does speaks to a player with glaring imperfections. Or to put it another way, there’s a reason he’s a cult hero rather than an actual hero.

There are mitigating factors to his Palace form, too, namely the lowered standards, the vastly reduced level of scrutiny – ever notice how players always look so much worse as soon as they’re playing for a big club? – and the patent fact that Sam Allardyce’s brand of football is far, far kinder to his centre-halves than Klopp’s.

That said, it’s hard to escape the notion that he would mark a serious upgrade on whichever bozo has been picked alongside Dejan Lovren this season (or indeed Lovren himself, who, though improved of late, remains a wincingly far cry from the Hyypia-Carragher lynchpin figure he was recruited to be).

On the other hand, perhaps we are in fact watching the perfect loan move in action. If a short-term move is designed to offer a stagnating player a change of scene in which to reinvigorate themselves – a run of first-team games, a lowered spotlight – before dropping him back into the bigger pond, ready and willing to thrive for a club who have kept him on the books, then perhaps this is in fact the quintessential example of that. From Liverpool's perspective, the worst-case scenario is that a player they do not want returns to the club with his market value having skyrocketed.

There has been so much complaining in recent years about the loan system being misused and exploited, and rightly so – but perhaps this is simply a rare instance when the process is being employed properly and constructively.

Or perhaps Klopp and Liverpool have bungled their hand badly, and cost themselves place at the top of the league in the process. That viewpoint, though, is founded on the glorious infinity of conjecture, which tends to be rather more rosy than cold, hard reality. Yet the reality is rosy enough: Sakho’s loan move is that rare thing, a transfer that suits all parties.

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