Napoli vs Liverpool: Jurgen Klopp eager to right wrong of 2018 Champions League ‘off-day’

Liverpool have not won in Italy for a decade and Klopp knows his side will have to be at their best to get something on Tuesday

If last season’s Champions League provided the highlight of Jurgen Klopp’s career, he has been precise in pinpointing the low point of a glorious campaign. Napoli away, the same test as confronts Liverpool at the San Paolo on Tuesday. It is a reunion with a team who almost eliminated Liverpool in the group stage and who Klopp semi-affectionately called “the cheeky bastards”.

Liverpool lost 1-0 in Italy last October. “The manager said it was probably our worst game of the season,” Trent Alexander-Arnold underlined on Saturday. Klopp elaborated on that with a frank admission that it was a failure of organisation; not so much on his part, as by the players who failed to heed his advice that Carlo Ancelotti was fielding both Allan and Marek Hamsik at the base of the midfield and then failed to adapt.

“We talk a lot about intensity,” Klopp said. “The Napoli game last season was not intensity, Napoli was an organisation problem. All the things we tell the boys, it is all about intensity and how much we have to invest, but before that it is all about information. What do you have to do in these moments?

“And Napoli play a specific style. To make it very simple, we played against them in our defending like they had one No. 6 but they had two No. 6s, the cheeky bastards. We knew before. We told them [that] they had two No. 6s but then everyone came too late. We tried to change it in the game and nobody listened and nobody could change and in the end, we were lucky it was only 1-0. It was really this kind of day off.”

If it represented a rare off-day in a season when Liverpool only lost seven games, three were away from home in their Champions League group. They took a perilous path to glory, but Klopp is adamant that Liverpool’s sixth European Cup does not change their status against a team who he has admired under first Maurizio Sarri and now Ancelotti. Liverpool have not won in Italy for a decade and Klopp feels the Champions League is so strong it doubles up as a European Super League.

“We don’t go there as a favourite,” Klopp insisted. “Yes, we won the competition last season but it is difficult, a very strong side, vice-champion of Italy two years in a row and really close to Juventus this year.”

Nothing has changed. Or not for him, anyway. Klopp maintained his breezy optimism during a spell when he lost his last six finals. Two Champions League final losses, one with Borussia Dortmund and one with Liverpool, did not define him in his own mind. Nor, now, does the achievement of conquering the continent which, to another, might have felt like the culmination of a lifetime’s work.

“I do not know the last time I thought about winning the Champions League without being asked about it,” he said. “It must be months ago. I don’t wake up and think about this. The last time I was on holiday. Nothing has changed for me. I was self-confident before. I have never had an issue with self-confidence.”

Where it has made a difference, he feels, is to the self-esteem of his charges. Liverpool established a reputation as one of Europe’s most formidable sides despite a seven-year wait for silverware at Anfield. Klopp’s dressing room features players who have been relegated or overlooked at previous clubs, who have suffered setbacks and now have the sort of achievement that validates them.

The competition he is most interested in is within his own squad. He is buoyed by the way Xherdan Shaqiri has adapted to a new role, conscious that Naby Keita will return soon, pleased others took note of a fit-again Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain’s fine performance at Southampton, saying he had “no explanation” why Dejan Lovren did not make the matchday squad against Newcastle on Saturday. “This is a really big club with competition between friends,” he added. “It is not ‘I have to kill him to play,’ it is really for the team.”

And he feels silverware can spur them on. “For the boys, they are young people and they feel they have things to prove,” Klopp argued. “Not to me. To the outside world, to go for the next one.” And so they do, looking to become the first Liverpool side to retain the European Cup since 1978, the first English team to do so since Nottingham Forest in 1980.