Jurgen Klopp, the Liverpool manager, will not be standing on ceremony this season. Or at least that must be the conclusion of his candid assessment of the value of the Community Shield, which Liverpool contest with Manchester City on Sunday afternoon.
“Is it a pre-season friendly?” he asked before establishing very firmly that if he wins his first one he will not be giving it a prominent place on his resume and that, to his mind, no judgement on either team’s medium-term prospects should be based on the outcome.
It is a provocative posture in one sense: Not many months ago, Liverpool, such valiant pursuers of City in last season’s Premier League, were being widely diagnosed with a grave shortage of trophies, of whatever carat, and the lack of them was deemed to be undermining the bold progress made through Klopp’s three-and-a-half years in charge. In June they then won the most prestigious club prize of all, the European Cup.
Next to that huge, big-eared chunk of silver, the Community Shield is indeed a mere trinket. It can also seem a non-essential piece of furniture in a cluttered calendar. Being European champions means for Liverpool a sudden swelling of demands on a squad that has not been significantly enlarged this summer.
Klopp’s team meet Chelsea in the Uefa Super Cup in Istanbul in 10 days, and by the time they head off for Qatar and the Fifa Club World Cup in December, the Premier League campaign will be 17 matches old, the League Cup will be up and running and Sadio Mane may have caught his breath.
Mane bears the most striking weight of numbers – 70 matches in 12 months – from what has been an extraordinary year for both Liverpool, who finished a point shy of a first league title this century and won the European Cup, and for the sport's ceaseless appetite for extended summer competitions. The Senegal striker played in the Africa Cup of Nations final only 16 days ago, finishing as a runner-up in the extended 24-team jamboree played in mid-summer Egyptian heat.
Meanwhile, Liverpool's goalkeeper Alisson and striker Roberto Firmino contested a Copa America through June and July, with winners Brazil. Virgil van Dijk and Gigi Wijnaldum cut short their celebrations of the Champions League triumph over Tottenham Hotspur with a summons to attend the inaugural Uefa Nations League, where their Netherlands reached the final. Mohamed Salah was also at the Afcon, until the last-16 stage, as was Naby Keita, who suffered injury there with Guinea, having been rushed back a little swiftly into competitive football after a long-lay-off.
All of which Klopp, to his credit, has been reluctant to itemise, player by player. This is not only because he knows City could also point to the heavy summer of action for the likes of Riyad Mahrez, an Afcon winner with Algeria, Gabriel Jesus, active at the Copa with Brazil, and the Argentine Copa America bronze medallists Sergio Aguero and Nicolas Otamendi.
Bernardo Silva also had a busy June as player of the tournament on the winning Portugal team at the Nations League, where City and Liverpool’s England players – Jordan Henderson, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Joe Gomez, Kyle Walker, John Stones and Raheem Sterling – required two bouts of extra time and a penalty shootout to earn their bronze medal and consign Liverpool and Switzerland’s Xherdan Shaqiri to fourth place.
So much for the mitigating fatigue factor that might make Sunday’s run-out at Wembley look unlike the tense and sometimes fevered contests between the first and second best teams in England through a riveting 2018/19. Klopp’s more acute fear is that wear-and-tear might undermine his team’s momentum over the next two or three months.
“We were a real results machine last year,” he points out, “and we have to prove again we can be on that level.”
He reasons City have already proved they can pass that test. They took 100 points from their 38 games when they won the Premier League in 2018; after a World Cup summer for many of their men, they then gained only two fewer points in 2018/19, when Liverpool pressed them to the last fixture, finishing second with a monumental 97 points, 22 more than Liverpool managed in 2017/18.
Faced with City’s overbearing consistency, the concern is that, like other title challenges in Liverpool’s recent past, the latest near-miss becomes an isolated episode, a one-off chapter in the background of City’s dynasty in the making. At Wembley on Sunday are the European champions, but also the light-blue juggernaut that has just won the domestic treble.
Or the quadruple if, unlike Klopp, you count the Community Shield as a fully-fledged trophy.
