Terrace Talk - Liverpool: Jurgen Klopp’s whine about officials afforded him few favours

Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp (left) speaks with the fourth official during the Premier League stalemate with Manchester United. Picture: Paul Ellis

For all the crying about Van Dijk, it’s my boy Jota that’s turned out to be the biggest miss.

Hello, dear reader. We’ve been kept apart by television’s ignominious grip on the fixture schedule.

Not that there was much to tell; brainless at Newcastle, spineless at Southampton and made Villa’s kids look like Brazil 70 for an hour. That about covers it unless you want to add hopeless for a ‘bonus’.

This concertina league is very disconcerting, though. We wallop Palace and everybody says, “who’ll come second?” – four games on and we’re finished, apparently. Politics and football share the same dizzying velocity of change.

2020/21 keeps excelling itself for strangeness. United went top thanks to Pogba; use a time machine to get the 2019 odds on that one.

It was hoped that target practise against Villa’s yoof might snap our currently unholy trinity out of their huff, ably assisted by Thiago, but even he began looking disheartened by Sunday’s end.

We’ve not seen much of him, but fair to say he must have been central to Klopp’s plans for a quick spritz of his workhouse midfield.

With Jota also coming in to keep the forwards on their toes, it was Klopp’s obvious masterplan to hold off Liverpool’s mortal enemy Complacency. He couldn’t have foreseen Evertonian savagery gumming up the works.

Solskjaer’s revival is another warning for any frustrated fans not to stomp off half-cocked, or for bitter rivals to gloat presumptuously. These two behemoths haven’t faced off in a title battle since 2009, the season of course when Benitez had his say on United’s stranglehold on officialdom.

Liverpool's Curtis Jones (centre) battles with Manchester United's Marcus Rashford. Picture: Phil Noble

It was probably not an ideal time for Klopp to repeat the same faux pas. Simplistic supporters find such guff restorative, but in practise it’s a distraction and gives ‘them’ the opportunity to act all superior and above it/us all.

Look, I don’t like United, I’ve got five senses like everybody else, but their enormous blot on our landscape should be ignored sometimes and a cheap rallying cry gets you precious little in the long run. You still need to beat everybody else.

It won’t help when injuries and rumoured departures keep us destabilised. Wijnaldum was going anyway, even if Thiago wasn’t about to take some of his game time off him, while Mo Salah “not smiling” tends to freak people out a lot more than it should.

Yet it’s undeniable he’s been right off his game for a while now, and somehow managed to make Shaw look like Maldini. Firmino had another of those games that some of us feared he’d have regularly without Jota’s hot breath down his neck.

Liverpool started okay but it all began to crumble. At the end, Klopp was complaining about timewasting when he should have just prayed for his point and a swift return to the drawing board.

The subs bench has got nothing on it now. That’s the only reason Firmino and Wijnaldum lasted as long as they did, although Milner replaced the latter and actually looked, well, interested.

Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp with Thiago Alcantara (centre) and Andrew Robertson after the game. Picture: Paul Ellis

Klopp must think now about using one of the young centre backs, because Henderson’s the metronome for this team, as impressive as Thiago has become.

Strange thing is, we’re not conceding many goals, but there’s a perceptible step backwards the whole team seems to be making in order to compensate for defensive absentees.

Klopp’s whine about officialdom afforded him few favours, either. There were subtle but obvious influences Tierney had, the early half time whistle being the obvious one, but if Mane had been allowed to go on, were you confident in a resounding finish? I wasn’t.

There were numerous stupid offside delays, all of which seemed to affect Liverpool the most, but that’s clutching enough straw to fill both hands. We barely deserved the draw in the end.

So we still need one game to fill our boots and get the attack on track. Villa clearly wasn’t it.