Liverpool 2.0 are not the best Liverpool but this is the best of Jurgen Klopp

While talk of the sheer boggling size of Jurgen Klopp’s cojones has been recently overstated, the job he’s currently doing at Liverpool has not.

We put Klopp second behind only Aston Villa’s Unai Emery in terms of Premier League management performance this season, because it’s important to remember that nobody tipped them for the title in August. And that includes anybody on this website, where it was all Manchester City this and Arsenal that.

Viewed from our January vantage point, the way we were all sleeping on Liverpool back then seems absurd. But we’ll slightly defend ourselves and say it really wasn’t some performative contrarian take to think this was a season where getting back into the Champions League was a reasonable limit for Klopp’s reworked side.

This was meant to be a season of transition at Anfield, a necessary but Saudi-hastened midfield overhaul combined with an attack and defence still coming together themselves leaving Liverpool surely a touch short once again of the very best the division had to offer.

Not a bit of it.

In a Premier League season where the standard in terms of overall depth is high it would probably be fair to say the quality right at the summit has dipped a bit from recent years. Peak Man City would not allow this Liverpool to be three points clear at the summit, surely. But that’s on them, not Klopp or the team he has built and its point-blank refusal to lose in any but the most ludicrous of circumstances.

Klopp would privately be the first to concede this Liverpool team isn’t as good as the very best Liverpool team he led in 2019 and 2020. But there is still enough of that team there to make everyone else wary now they’ve positioned themselves so wonderfully.

It’s slightly misleading to talk about the core or spine of a team where two nominally wide players in Mo Salah and Trent Alexander-Arnold carry such outsized importance, but – current temporary AFCON absence for Salah apart – they’re still there and better than ever, as is Alisson. Virgil van Dijk had a little wobble against Fulham but has in general looked far more like the Van Dijk of old.

A canny summer of recruitment has successfully mitigated the midfield losses, while Joe Gomez has proved an invaluable odd-job man in filling whatever gaps might have turned up in an injury-ravaged defence this week.

It’s all enormously impressive, but it still doesn’t scream title challenge. Not without Klopp.

This is not his best Liverpool side, but it might well be the one of which he personally can be most proud. They might also be his most fun Liverpool side yet, because of rather than despite the limitations and imperfections being more conspicuous. They’re great to watch, this Liverpool team.

They still at times have the heavy metal football of old but there’s an undeniable frailty there too. The paradox is that in revealing this frailty they and Klopp have also revealed their strength. They go behind an awful lot. They still very often win. They almost never lose.

In a season where everyone else has already lost at least three times in the league, Liverpool still have just the one reverse on their ledger, and that particular game was, it would be fair to say, absolutely f***ing ridiculous.

They’ve sauntered through the Europa League group stage, have eyes on the Carabao final after once again using their bench ‘weapons’ to come from behind against Fulham and have knocked Arsenal out of the FA Cup having somehow – and an element of sheer dumb luck must be acknowledged here – weathered a first-half storm.

It’s hard really to see how this season could have gone much better for Liverpool, given where it began and VAR’s good processes notwithstanding.