THIS WILL BE no maudlin farewell tour for Jurgen Klopp.
Tonight Liverpool devoured Chelsea with an unsparing hunger and fury: they scored four and could have scored twice that had Darwin Nunez not picked another night to indulge his very particular black humour.
Anfield is self-consciously rocking and roiling now and while the manager might have provide the pre-game spark, his players kept shovelling on the coal. Tonight they suffocated Chelsea with an intensity of pressing to match anything Klopp’s sides have ever produced.
When he took over at Dortmund, Klopp spoke about wanting to build a team whose passion was obvious to anyone sitting in the stands with their eyes closed: tonight Liverpool’s intensity would have been palpable to the dog-walkers in Stanley Park.
Chelsea, who are less a team than a portfolio of rapidly depreciating assets, provided a neat contrast to Liverpool’s awesome collective. Tonight there was no Salah, no Endo, no Robertson, and no Alexander-Arnold. There was no problem either.
That’s primarily down to Conor Bradley, who delivered another performance to leave Irish football fans Googling ‘border poll.’ He created goals one and three and scored the second, an unerring, on-the-run finish into the bottom corner. It’s not just the floppy fringe that’s stirring comparisons with Steven Gerrard’s breakthrough.
But if Liverpool brought the heavy metal, Darwin Nunez shook the wood.
It is testament to Liverpool’s artillery that they could relegate Darwin’s latest psychodrama to a B plot: tonight he hit the woodwork four times, a Premier League record and more than any other player has managed across all of their games in the league this season. One of those clangs was from the penalty spot, and another from a point-blank header in front of the Kop. Nunez spent most of the game shooting on site; a wild flourish of speculating to accumulate that would have at least earn the respect of Todd Boehly and Chelsea’s transfer gurus.
And yet Nunez created Luiz Diaz’ goal and generally tormented the Chelsea defence all night. The Darwin Debate will outlast Klopp, and perhaps time itself.
Few teams could have lived with Liverpool tonight, but that doesn’t mean Chelsea weren’t abysmal. They were timid and diffident and looked the collection of ill-fitting, disparate parts they are. Mauricio Pochettino made a triple sub at half-time but it was conservative bit of bloodletting. Chelsea’s quarter-billion midfield duo were anonymous; Badiashile’s name didn’t accurately describe his performance; Mykhaylo Mudryk delivered another night of thwarted promise and baffling impotence, a PG version of Darwin.
Christopher Nkunku – whose injury absence has been devastating – came on to score amid Liverpool’s only wobble, when their furious rhythm was briefly interrupted by Klopp’s quadruple substitution. They might have had a couple of penalties too, but Paul Tierney reffed the game as if he realised he was running out of opportunities to atone for past flashpoints with Klopp.
Up to last week, Liverpool’s season had been framed largely as what it augured for next season, with Klopp batting away questions about the potential heights of Liverpool 2.0. That image of the future was shattered by last week’s bombshell, but it clarifies the present too. Nothing that happens over the next few months has any relevance to next season or the season after; nothing now matters beyond the end of this season.
That makes the future daunting but the next several weeks liberating, and Liverpool tonight ran and ran with that curious freedom of the damned. This is what has been so irresistible about Liverpool’s momentum over the Klopp years, their ability to press and sprint like they would never play another game.
But now the clock is really ticking, and Klopp’s Liverpool are running out of tomorrows.
Which is precisely what makes them dangerous.
