Stubborn Jurgen Klopp denying Liverpool short-term gains

At what point does a quirk become a trend? It’s a question that will have occurred to a fair few at Anfield on Sunday, as Liverpool’s fourth meeting with Southampton this season concluded, for the fourth time, with Jurgen Klopp’s team failing to outwit an obstinate Saints defence.

Four games is hardly a representative sample size, yet Liverpool’s futile efforts against Southampton this year have had more in common than a simple lack of goals. The games have all followed a similar pattern: Southampton sit deep, Liverpool huff and puff in vain, and, on two of the four occasions, Southampton scamper down the other end to nick a win.

Claude Puel has implemented the sit-and-stifle blueprint masterfully against Liverpool, but he’s far from the only coach to do so. A fortnight ago, Sam Allardyce came away from Anfield grinning with glee having won through similar means; a week later, only a career-best moment from Emre Can prevented Watford from grinding out a point against Jurgen Klopp’s men; in August, Burnley deployed two banks of four to perfection, turning 20% possession into a 2-0 win.

Jose Mourinho is another coach to have subdued Liverpool on their own turf this term and come away with a result and while the Portuguese may be the grandmaster of tactical smotherings, neither Paul Lambert nor Derek Adams could be described as the grandmaster of anything, and have done exactly the same. It is not yet a huge problem for Klopp – Liverpool’s tally of 42 goals at home this season is the division’s third most – but it’s an issue that is simmering ominously.

In a way it’s flattering when one team sets up simply to stop the other from scoring – effectively an open acknowledgment of the opponent’s attacking class. But it works both ways. As Liverpool have discovered to their cost this term, flattery can quickly turn into embarrassment.

An odd theme running through these frustration-fixtures has been Klopp’s apparent unwillingness to change things up. Sunday’s game was a case in point: for the entire first half, it was glaringly obvious that the home side had neither the clout nor craft to conjure a goal – they could have played all week and not scored – and yet it wasn’t until the match had passed its two-thirds mark that Adam Lallana and Daniel Sturridge were summoned from the bench; against Palace, the first change came on minute 79; when Southampton won at Anfield earlier this season it was in the 78th.

The first thing to be said here is that this is as much down to necessity as policy. Liverpool’s squad is verging on skeletal and it only takes a couple of injuries to reduce Klopp’s options, in Redknappian terms, to the bare bones. Against Palace, Liverpool’s substitutes had 76 Premier League starts between them; on the opposition bench, Patrick van Aanholt had more than that on his own.

Across the course of the season, Klopp’s first switch has come, on average, at the 60-minute mark when his side are losing, and his double change at half-time against Stoke was proof that he isn’t against making changes so long as the quality is there.

At the same time, though, he has regularly has opted against making changes. Often they are changes in the purest sense of the term, too: substitutes who offer an obvious shift in emphasis, something different. Alberto Moreno, for example, is routinely ignored by Klopp in games where Liverpool need a goal against teams unlikely to expose his defensive frailties. On Sunday the Spaniard was flipping water bottles as an unused substitute, while a team desperately short of pace, width and anyone with a left foot could not pick a way through a massed defence.

There is clearly a thought process happening here: that refraining from changing things is a way of training the team to keep faith in and fine-tune Plan A, and that this will bear more fruit in the long run than resorting to a hastily thrown-together Plan B.

The shame, though, is that substitutions in and of themselves can help alter the momentum of a game: for a frustrated home crowd, the sight of a new player taking to the field represents renewed hope, if only briefly. For a team turning the screw, a well-timed change can help reinforce the message that the goal is coming, which in itself can play out as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Alex Ferguson, for instance, was no tactical mastermind, but he could play the Old Trafford crowd like a fiddle, his substitutions a big part of that.

For Klopp, the bottom line is that he needs more players, and until he does these analyses will be more than a little unfair. But as much as the team may be ultimately on an upward trajectory, his refusal to chase a win by playing a wildcard as the clock ticks down can be more than a little maddening.

Of course, that tightrope between the short- and long-term – between implementing a masterplan and amassing points in the here and now – has always been football management’s great challenge. Klopp’s unbending far-sightedness is to be lauded, but sometimes a bit of short-termism can be forgivable. Sometimes, like when it edges you into the Champions League, it can have long-term benefits, too.