EPL TALK: Liverpool’s dogged persistence defies belief as they keep pace with relentless Manchester City

WATARU Endo was not considered substantial Liverpool material. He was a stop-gap between superior signings for the Reds. He was the one who came in after Moisés Caicedo got away. Endo was making up the numbers.

At Anfield this morning, Endo made up ground against Kevin de Bruyne, leaving the Belgian a peripheral character in a weird storyline. The prince and the pest. Endo never left Manchester City’s artist-in-residence alone, interrupting every brushstroke until a frustrated de Bruyne threatened to spoil his own canvas. But by then, it didn’t matter. The class was over. Endo had schooled a legend.

It didn’t make sense.

It’s Liverpool under Jurgen Klopp.

Meanwhile, Kyle Walker topped sprint records for years, for club and country. No one matched the full-back’s speed. Just as Rodri ran with an extra lung for years. No one matched his stamina. Luis Diaz powered through both of them, a Colombian pocket knife gliding through butter. In the dying moments. The Reds' wide man won a corner and ordered Anfield to match his own intensity and rise up. Feel the noise from within. It was madness.

It didn’t make any sense.

It’s Liverpool under Jurgen Klopp.

In the opening exchanges, Conor Bradley was exposed twice. Pep Guardiola had targeted Liverpool’s weakest link. Age and inexperience were finally betraying the 20-year-old right-back. Doggy-paddle wasn’t enough anymore. The kid was swimming with sharks. Carnage was inevitable. But Bradley doubled down and surged forward, bypassing midfield to feed Darwin Nunez. What were the Reds thinking, bringing a water pistol to a gunfight?

But Bradley persevered and largely prevailed.

It didn’t make any sense.

It’s Liverpool under Jurgen Klopp.

Nothing much makes sense around Anfield anymore. It’s where we are in this irrational reality. The Reds had half their team missing, a couple of half-fit superstars on the bench, a shaky quintet of underlings and under-age performers in Endo, Joe Gomez, Diaz, Bradley, Jarell Quansah and Harvey Elliott and opponents in imperial mode. There were potential mismatches everywhere, but they were simply ignored, swatted aside like a pesky irrelevance.

There’s something happening at Liverpool, something that’ll never happen again at any club, in all likelihood, a breath-taking clash of kinetic energies that are pushing a club beyond the boundaries of logic and reasoning, beyond all those traditional lines that mark physical limitations. Klopp is leaving so everyone must keep going, to the very end. Unstoppable forces are railing against a moveable object. It’s an endearing act of rebellion.

Great managers leave great clubs, but this feels different. Because it is different. Sir Alex Ferguson squeezed a final hurrah from a loyal group of legendary veterans at Manchester United and Liverpool’s Boot Room once produced managers with good instincts, always knowing when to go out on a high. But the Reds are not on a high. Not quite. They are in a period of transition. It’s a very "first world" period of transition, certainly, but a transitional state nonetheless.

Absurd to see injury-hit Liverpool still in contention

For the Reds to still be in contention for all four trophies available to them, in mid-March, is absurd, but a reminder that Klopp’s current achievements may be slyly eclipsing all others at Anfield. Liverpool are a patchwork quilt of vibrant colours, odd shapes and a few frilly bits that are great fun to look at. Most of the time, you can’t take your eyes off them. But their opponents are an industrial winning complex.

It’s not quite peashooters against tanks – no one’s playing any violins in the Kop – but it shouldn’t be this close, either on the pitch or in the league table. But this is what happens when a manager’s default position is perpetual movement. Klopp is the Duracell Bunny. He bangs the drums incessantly or Anfield falls silent. There’s no middle ground with a middling squad. Klopp gives everything or Liverpool have nothing. The battery must be entirely drained before he leaves.

And his players are clearly getting that. Their frenetic, dizzying performance against Manchester City was just the latest example of a grateful squad recognising that time spent with an irreplaceable icon is fleeting. They are morphing into Klopp clones, metaphorically thumping their chests with their own job duties. Diaz’s incomprehensible sprint past Walker, Endo taking out de Bruyne, Caoimhin Kelleher filling Alisson’s boots and Quansah keeping both Erling Haaland and Julian Alvarez quiet are all acts of imitation, to sincerely flatter their departing coach.

Just consider the last one again. Quansah took care of both Haaland and Alvarez, a claim surely from a parallel universe. Quansah is a recent academy graduate. Alvarez is a World Cup winner. Haaland is a Nordic god-freak lifted from the daftest pages of Marvel comics. This isn’t so much a mismatch as it is a misalignment of different species. City’s duo had to batter the kid into submission. They had to.

But they didn't, because conventional wisdom doesn’t apply to Liverpool anymore. They’re making it up as they go along and so are we, trying to find tactical and practical explanations for a team incapable of recognising its supposed limitations. Pundits will focus on shots on goal and acknowledge the second-half tweak that saw the Reds bypass John Stones altogether to feed Nunez, because that’s easier. Such data is cold, rational and comforting. We can explain that.

But we can’t explain the rest. We can’t explain how Diaz can outrun Walker any more than we can work out why a journeyman from Japan can shackle the best of all time from Belgium. It’s unsettling, disorientating and brilliant.

It doesn’t make any sense.

It’s Liverpool under Jurgen Klopp.

And even now, that special relationship between club and coach remains mystical and elusive. In truth, we don’t really know what he says or how he does it, but Klopp’s unrivalled alchemy continues to turn ordinary men into monsters.

Neil Humphreys is an award-winning football writer and a best-selling author, who has covered the English Premier League since 2000 and has written 28 books.

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