Terrace Talk: Liverpool - Liverpool Limbo is a theatrical show in many acts

This is going to take years, isn’t it? Bring a good book next time.

The midweek European ‘action’ didn’t get any better either, not that many thought it would. It was a wake-up call for JK though, watching us struggle to beat 10 men collectively named after a New York accountant. Armed with banjos and hunting for cows’ arses it was a fruitless, irritable evening.

Klopp looks the part at least. The substance will have to wait. Anyone with an atom of common sense expected nothing else.

Welcome to Act 2 of Liverpool Limbo, where the new man trundles on and makes his mistakes like the previous fellow. Act 1 of course is where we hang around patiently while our overlords finally reach the conclusion we reached about the ex-manager months ago.

It’s frustrating, doubly so since it’s a long wait coming off the back of another long wait.

Look, it’s simple. (A) Did Rodgers have to go? (B) Was Klopp one of the best currently available? (C) Did the club do well to get him? As one of Merseyside’s foremost miserabilists, it’s a cold day in hell when I tick three boxes positively for a club that in recent years raised comedic invention to an art form.

So we’re just looking for clues right now. Lallana’s improved (a bit), Sakho confirmed what most fans knew all along, but mainly it’s just relief that Liverpool acted when they did.

There are only two other recent times when I’ve felt halfway sure they had the right man before a ball was kicked. Graeme Souness and Rafa Benitez were those two, which comes under the heading ‘polar opposites’. Klopp could as easily emulate one as the other, let’s not pretend otherwise.

When football becomes an exact science, no-one will want to watch it any more. The best striker in English football currently is Jamie Vardy. Jamie. Vardy. And the champions have lost almost as many league games as Newcastle. Tell me this country isn’t a madhouse.

Klopp, like Rodgers before him, won’t be relying on Daniel Sturridge any time soon. There have been some embittered murmurings about a player who wouldn’t exactly make the 300 for Sparta, but the actual news suggests he’s not in a good place right now.

“Fluid on the knee”? How can something sound harmless and horrible at the same time? Those of us nearing pensionable age are used to leaky parts of the body, but the knee? Urrgh.

Klopp won’t be getting goals from Origi either, despite some hype recently. If JK was a little wooden boy his nose would be reaching Dortmund by now. The journalist who nicknamed Origi ‘Sushi’ because he was raw and the deal smelled fishy may have hit on something. Benteke was on five minutes and did more than his countryman has in two-and-a-half games. He took his goal well too.

Southampton came as slight favourites, given the state we’re in allied to an unrelenting schedule and Klopp’s bizarre attitude to rotation (i.e. balls to it). That we came so close to winning ought not to be a cause of happiness but we’re clutching anything that resembles straw now.

We’ve lost two games from 14 this season. Clutch that if you like. Just ignore the fact we’ve only won three.

Rodgers sympathisers — sacked Brit managers usually get some crocodile tears — may care to reflect on how much this squad cost and how unfit for purpose it looks.

Even the freebie Milner, presumably still brimming with self-satisfaction after finally finding a red head with a cross, undid his one bit of good work with a foul so chronically stupid it came with its own dunce’s cap.

Lord knows what the walking wounded will look like against Chelsea next week. They’ve got their own problems of course, but a week is a long time in football.

Every Liverpool week will be long from now on.

We’ve lost two games from 14 this season. Clutch that if you like. Just ignore the fact we’ve only won three