[article]Almost from the moment he said it, chewing the fat with a handful of English journalists in Dortmund four and a half years ago, Jürgen Klopp has been trying to distance himself from the phrase “heavy-metal football”. Last night, after his Liverpool team turned the volume up to 11 once more, he came up with a different term. “All-inclusive football,” he called it. “Everything is involved.”
With this Liverpool team, just like his much-loved Borussia Dortmund side, that certainly looks like the case. Nothing seems to be held back. It is full throttle — pedal to the metal. No quarter given, nothing held back. Trent Alexander-Arnold and Andrew Robertson bomb forward from full back, while Sadio Mané, Roberto Firmino and the incomparable Mohamed Salah wreak havoc in attack. On nights like this, it looks like an invigorating, intoxicating, overpowering combination.
No team, though, can go full throttle for 90 minutes, time after time after time. There has to be a sense of knowing when to hold back, when to exercise just a little restraint. Even “all-inclusive football” requires that occasionally.
In this Liverpool side, that job falls to Jordan Henderson and James Milner, captain and vice-captain. They have been two of English football’s whipping boys at times over the past decade, derided as symbols of the national team’s impoverishment, yet here they were dominating the central midfield in a Champions League semi-final, first leg against Roma — against Daniele De Rossi, Kevin Strootman and Radja Nainggolan, just as they did against the Manchester City trio of Kevin De Bruyne, Fernandinho and David Silva over two legs of the quarter-final.
This is not a Liverpool team like the one that Rafa Benítez led to the Champions League final in 2007, when their supporters looked at the contrasting qualities of Steven Gerrard, Xabi Alonso, Momo Sissoko and Javier Mascherano and declared they had the “best midfield in the world”. Nobody would dare to say that of whichever combination Klopp has chosen among Henderson, Milner, Emre Can, Georginio Wijnaldum and the luckless Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain.
So often this season, though, it has worked. Even with Can injured and Oxlade-Chamberlain stretchered off in the first half last night with what looked alarmingly like knee ligament damage, Liverpool’s midfield did the job. It was Henderson, Milner and Wijnaldum, on as substitute for Oxlade-Chamberlain, and once more it looked so much more than the sum of its parts.
There have been times when the Liverpool captaincy has looked like a heavy burden for Henderson to carry. Ron Yeats, Emlyn Hughes, Graeme Souness, Alan Hansen, Gerrard . . . it is a distinguished bloodline. Throughout this extraordinary campaign, though, he has been immense. He has little of Souness’s imposing personality, Hansen’s composure or Gerrard’s infectious dynamism, but he has, in the words of the England manager Gareth Southgate, emerged as a “leader of men”.
It is not stretching it to say that the former Sunderland player dominated midfield last night. De Rossi excelled for Roma in the early stages, alongside Strootman and Nainggolan, but then Henderson, Milner and Wijnaldum took control, building the foundations for the front three to weave their magic further forward.
So much of what they did was basic, unglamorous stuff. When Roma’s pressure was at its height, Milner beat Cengiz Ünder to a challenge in midfield. A few minutes later, he beat the same player to a loose ball. Roma’s players had looked unmoved by the atmosphere, but Ünder suddenly looked unsure of himself. On 25 minutes he carried the ball forward on the counterattack, building up speed, only for Henderson to race back and win it back.
If there was a turning point in the game, that Henderson tackle was it. It lifted his team-mates, took some of the sting out of Roma and, significantly, it energised the home crowd still further. In that moment, it was as if the balance of the game had swung back in Liverpool’s favour. It suddenly looked and felt as if there were red shirts everywhere, swarming around their opponents, never giving them a second to relax in possession. Firmino excels at that, as does Robertson, but the tone is set from the midfield. Without it, Salah could not do what Salah does.
It was similar with Klopp’s Dortmund team. They had noted creative players during those years — Ilkay Gündogan, Shinji Kagawa, Mario Götze, Henrikh Mkhitaryan — but Klopp looked to individuals such as Sven Bender, Sebastian Kehl and Kevin Grosskreutz to bring a workmanlike core to his team. As with Liverpool last night, there was the boundless energy that “heavy-metal football” implied, but there was also a level-headedness to their approach.
The closing stages brought that into question. It somehow seemed typical of this team that, having done the hard work by scoring five times, they allowed Roma a way back into the game, but the problem was an individual error, by Dejan Lovren, rather than the collective anxiety that has taken hold in previous times. What followed was not quite the tongue-lashing Souness would have given, but Henderson let him know. All-inclusive means precisely that. You cannot switch off, not even for a second, when the stakes are as high as this.[/article]
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