Mentality Monsters V2.0 – Klopp's New Gems

So many 'new' players making a difference

Mentality Monsters V2.0 – Klopp's New Gems

Harvey Elliott ran off the pitch, with minutes left, to celebrate with an ecstatic Alexis Mac Allister and his manager, Jürgen Klopp, as around them, Ben Doak, Wataru Endo, Luis Díaz, Stefan Bajcetic, Cody Gakpo and Kostas Tsimikas beamed and hugged and high-fived.

On the pitch, Darwin Núñez was thanking the (red) heavens, as teammates including Dominik Szoboszlai, Jarell Quansah and Diogo Jota celebrated his winning goal.

Missing was the hitherto whole-hearted ball-winning crunching machine, Ibrahima Konaté; and Curtis Jones, whose teenaged league blooding came after the 2020 title was won (and who stepped up massively last season), in the behind-closed-doors run-in.

Rather than going for the vanity of a record points haul (over 100 points was doable), once the title was won, Klopp gave minutes to kids, including Elliott and Jones.

Not one of the players mentioned was at the club during the Mentality Monsters 1.0 era, besides – mostly in the youth teams – Elliott, Jones and Quansah. (Also absent, Thiago Alcantara, who joined in late 2020.)

Some of these were stellar in 2021/22, when it's easy to forget how close the team came to a quadruple that would have far bettered Man City's treble last season; perhaps denied only by a shocking penalty bottling by – you guessed it – Paul Tierney at Everton (favouring a Manchester club again), and the distressing carnage of Paris that left many Liverpool fans stranded outside or choked with teargas (and Thibaut Courtois denied 4-goals' worth of on-target/post-shot xG.)

The reset is almost complete; a player or two this week would really help, but Quansah is the real deal, as are Doak and Bajcetic. Bonds are forming. Understandings are flourishing.

Mac Allister and Szoboszlai are already doing more in midfield than about six of the players who left this summer managed last season.

To scale a summit, you need to learn to overcome setbacks and adversity; and when a team changes this much in the space of three years, the shared knowledge and belief gets lost. At the same time, the gradual rebuilding (last season aside) has helped; and even then, the failures allowed Gakpo, Jones and Bajcetic to alter the dynamic, and Trent Alexander-Arnold to reinvent his role.

In the majority of this article I want to praise a few of these, albeit I focused on the simply majestic Szoboszlai last week (see the article link panel below); I've compared him to a young Kevin de Bruyne, except at 22, KdB was not this good.

(Chelsea let him go aged 22, and he didn't come good at Wolfsburg until 23-24. De Bruyne also cost City £54m almost a decade ago, which works out at £144m now.)

Rising Reds

Anyway, onto this week’s rising Reds.

The majority of this article is for paying ZenDen subscribers only.

*Note: the ZenDen is additional content separate from the TTT Main Hub. Rather than seek to write freelance work for other outlets, to supplement my income and keep TTT running (as everything gets far more expensive), I write paywalled, zen-like material on this, my TTT ZenDen.

The ZenDen is a quiet space with no commenting – just articles to read. The TTT community remains on the Main Hub, and its where I interact with subscribers, write other articles, and provide post-match analysis.*