Nobody likes to hear a football manager making an excuse for his side’s failings. But anyone who witnessed the game against Leicester on Wednesday evening perhaps would have agreed with Jurgen Klopp’s sentiments that the snow caused his players to freeze on the big stage.
Remember when there was uproar as Jurgen Klopp named a weakened side and we were knocked out of the FA Cup in the third round? Ask the players as they reclined on their sun loungers in Dubai last week if they thought that was a bad thing!
The secret to being the best is in knowing that on any given day, you can’t always be at your best. If that makes sense. That parable may be made up, but it certainly has truth to it when we think about it in the context of football.
Four points clear at the summit of the Premier League table and into the last 16 of the Champions League: the first half of the 2018/19 campaign could not have gone any better.
Plenty has been written about Liverpool’s early exit from the FA Cup. Was Jurgen Klopp disrespectful to the competition by naming a much-weakened side? Did he do the club a disservice by failing to acknowledge that this was a trophy we could be lifting come May? Or has he played a blinder in focusing solely on the Premier League title race and the Champions League?
Losing away at Manchester City is not a disaster. The bookies, who typically act as the barometer for these things through their odds, made the champions roughly an even money prospect to win on Thursday evening. Liverpool, on the other hand, were outsiders at 5/2.
A Premier League title eliminator on January 3rd? Okay, it’s not as straightforward as that – life, and certainly football, never are, but let’s not beat about the bush: Thursday’s match will have a colossal impact on the destination of the famous trophy.