If last season’s Champions League provided the highlight of Jurgen Klopp’s career, he has been precise in pinpointing the low point of a glorious campaign. Napoli away, the same test as confronts Liverpool at the San Paolo on Tuesday. It is a reunion with a team who almost eliminated Liverpool in the group stage and who Klopp semi-affectionately called “the cheeky bastards”.
Liverpool lost 1-0 in Italy last October. “The manager said it was probably our worst game of the season,” Trent Alexander-Arnold underlined on Saturday. Klopp elaborated on that with a frank admission that it was a failure of organisation; not so much on his part, as by the players who failed to heed his advice that Carlo Ancelotti was fielding both Allan and Marek Hamsik at the base of the midfield and then failed to adapt.
“We talk a lot about intensity,” Klopp said. “The Napoli game last season was not intensity, Napoli was an organisation problem. All the things we tell the boys, it is all about intensity and how much we have to invest, but before that it is all about information. What do you have to do in these moments?
“And Napoli play a specific style. To make it very simple, we played against them in our defending like they had one No. 6 but they had two No. 6s, the cheeky bastards. We knew before. We told them [that] they had two No. 6s but then everyone came too late. We tried to change it in the game and nobody listened and nobody could change and in the end, we were lucky it was only 1-0. It was really this kind of day off.”
If it represented a rare off-day in a season when Liverpool only lost seven games, three were away from home in their Champions League group. They took a perilous path to glory, but Klopp is adamant that Liverpool’s sixth European Cup does not change their status against a team who he has admired under first Maurizio Sarri and now Ancelotti. Liverpool have not won in Italy for a decade and Klopp feels the Champions League is so strong it doubles up as a European Super League.