Jürgen Klopp discusses Liverpool's tactical flexibility
Jürgen Klopp has explained the thinking behind the tactical flexibility Liverpool have shown in recent weeks.
Convincing victories over Red Star Belgrade and Cardiff City in their last two matches have seen the Reds start with two deeper-lying midfielders, as opposed to one.
That tweak has partly been enforced by injuries to Jordan Henderson and Naby Keita - both of whom will miss Saturday’s trip to Arsenal - with Fabinho and Georginio Wijnaldum being nominally stationed as ‘No.6s’ versus Red Star and Cardiff.
And Klopp has been satisfied, if not surprised, by the way his side have made the transition.
“That’s what you build a squad for. Two [injuries] should always be possible to deal with, of course the third one would have been already a bit more problematic,” the boss said.
“Line-up-wise it’s never a real problem but then how can you change during a game, which you should do because of the intensity of all the games?
“But yes, it’s good for us of course that we could deal with that in the way we did and the boys did really well. We adapted, we changed systems a little bit and different things so it was good to see.
“There was not a doubt about that, to be honest, before, but now the most intense period in the season - and I think we had already a few intense periods - is still to come.
“We have now a very intense week, then the international break, and then we really go for it. It feels like we play until March every second day.
“That’s the situation for all of us [Premier League teams], not only us, but that’s when we need them all fit. So hopefully we have them all fit. We should not look for excuses, which we never do, and try to get what we can get.”
Delving more specifically into the variations involved in different formations, Klopp continued: “Players shouldn’t lose rhythm if you change this little bit of a system. It’s not that we play with only two at the back and eight up front or something like that, it’s really not that massive a difference.
“A system is there to bring the players in their most comfortable position, but if they stay in that position it’s quite a boring game so they have to move, they have to do different things. You need to train a formation for defending where everybody knows what to do and for offensive things you need to find a formation where they really are in their best area on the pitch.
“We can do that in different ways, obviously, but we have a squad: if you think about the number of midfielders when they’re all fit, for example, then it makes sense to bring a few more midfielders with different offensive jobs to do.
“We are not that stubborn system-wise, we were never. Even without you maybe seeing it, we played already diamonds in this season and nobody spoke about it afterwards.
“For us it was a diamond, but it obviously was not that obvious afterwards otherwise there would have been big stories about that!
“So we try to use the players in the best way and give them the position where they can shine.”