LAST season, it felt as though Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool could dominate English football for years.
The German appeared to have built the ‘bastion of invincibility’ Bill Shankly used to brag about, as his world and European champions won 26 of their first 27 Premier League matches.
That relentless winning run is a distant memory after an unprecedented fifth straight home league defeat, by Chelsea on Thursday, left Liverpool seventh in the table.
And Klopp now claims that the idea of reigning for a generation was always a pipe dream.
He insists that only Manchester City, with their magic Abu Dhabi money tree, are capable of winning the title year in, year out.
Klopp said: “If your problems are not getting bigger than solutions, you can have it.
“But it’s the most difficult league to stay on top for a long, long period, in England.
“It could happen. There is one club that maybe has everything for it — the quality of players, the manager, the money and everything — and that is Man City.
“All the rest have to fight with all you have to get close.
“When you are close enough you can maybe do what we showed last year.”
Many in the wider Liverpool family cling to the club’s corporate mantra of ‘This Means More’ — with Jamie Carragher and Jason McAteer claiming the Reds have suffered far more than others in the behind-closed-doors era because their supporters are more passionate.
Yet Klopp is far more realistic about his fallen champions.
While his central-defensive injury crisis is clearly debilitating — with new boy Ozan Kabak joining Virgil van Dijk, Joe Gomez and Joel Matip on the missing list for tomorrow’s clash with Fulham — Klopp admits Liverpool should still be doing far better.
He said: “There is a big difference between the situation we are in now and the situation which could have happened.
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“Coming second or third, in a year when it’s not perfect for you, is, I think, for everybody, absolutely OK. Then you have the chance to go as far as possible in the cup competitions and the Champions League.
“But our situation is different. I think we all agree it is a really strange one, injury-wise, and football is much more a rhythm game than people might think.
“When you can rely on different things and build on different things, you can reach your personal best as a team.
“We’ve never had that situation this season — that we could really build on something because we’ve had to change too much.”
If Liverpool fail to defeat relegation-threatened Fulham, their winless home run would be close to three months.
And so Klopp is demanding his team learn to win ugly.
The Anfield boss said: “It was clear that it would be difficult for us, but the job we have to do is to fight with all we have to get results anyway — maybe not with your absolute best football.
“And that’s the point where we didn’t do well enough.
“In an average game, you can still win it or draw it — but we lost even games when we were actually good.
“And this is exactly the opposite of how it should be.
“We are very self-critical and we take all the criticism, that is absolutely OK.”
Klopp talked up 18th-placed Fulham and their manager Scott Parker.
Yet the Londoners have scored just nine goals in their past 12 league games and so this fixture must surely be viewed as a perfect opportunity to end Liverpool’s worst home run of all time.
The Liverpool boss said: “We have to improve our decision-making in decisive moments — that’s clear and obvious.
“Chelsea had more shots on target than we had — it’s a sign. A lot of things were good but the last pass was not good enough and that killed these situations.”
Klopp again claimed that he has no problem with Mo Salah after the Premier League’s 17-goal leading scorer showed an angry reaction to being substituted against Chelsea.
He said: “We were 1-0 down, which makes no player happy. And, as a striker, you think you should stay on the pitch — that’s not an issue.
“Mo still has a great scoring record. He knows himself that even he could have scored more goals — but Mo’s scoring record is not our problem.
“In general we have to improve, 100 per cent.”
LIVERPOOL (likely): Alisson; Alexander-Arnold, Phillips, Fabinho, Robertson; Thiago, Wijnaldum, Jones; Salah, Firmino, Mane.
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