Liverpool XI: Kelleher, Bradley, Quansah, Van Dijk, Gomez. Endo, Szoboszlai, Mac Allister, Diaz, Nunez, Elliott.
This is the team they went and bombarded City with. It has only 2 players from what you've listed starting with Salah and Robertson coming off the bench. At one time or another, most of those incoming transfers have been deemed: a joke (Nunez); not good enough (Gomez); overrated (Mac Allister); overpriced (Szoboszlai); decent (Endo) with Diaz probably being the one who has been given credit from the moment he arrived. There's just no way the aforementioned in your post can be credited with carrying practically a whole team when it was so sterling with the vast majority of them not there. The players have also, for the most part, arrived within the same timeframe ten Hag has been at this club
They won't be given full credit, given the rivalry, but what they did is out of this world impressive given it's a bunch of nobodies in a patchwork quilt of an XI. It's testament to coaching and the assimilation of the system played that such a thing is even possible. There is merit in the line that Klopp is X amount of years deep there, but you do not need that many years to implement what you want at a club. LVG proved this, transforming us within a preseason when first arriving, and again, having a bunch of nobodies play his system to perfection, promoting kids who had done nothing, and went on to do 'nothing' into his first team plans and cover without a bat of an eye; even Jose did the same, in his own way, having us play exactly how he wanted down to almost a man within a preseason.
Ten Hag might not be excessively long in the job now, but equally, he is not excessively short in it either; by this time, the justifiable reasons why we look like a team who have barely played with one another are simply not there - from the amount of misplaced passes, incohesive build-ups and inability to do anything collectively constructive with the ball (it's a miracle to see us complete any kind of extensive passive chain) we're not just lacking; we're at a point where it's a legitimate and fair ask to want to know what it is that we do in training to look so bad game in and game out. This notion you can only grind and get by when your starters are injured or unavailable is a memo only we seem to have. It's at a stage by now where clubs are objectively displaying that coaching and training is king, with Liverpool's decimated team putting the best of the best to the sword being a new high/low in the in what we can take from the disparity. When is anything we do an astonishing achievement? When do we ever look like a team greater than the sum of its parts? LVG needs to be cited once more given the hilarity and bizarreness of some of the lineups he had playing exactly how he wanted and frustrating PL teams with verifiably better players than what he would field showing what top notch coaching looks like, as well as what it achieves.
The running of any club determines the quality of what a manager gets to work with, and of course, you wish for it to be a harmonious relationship, but coaches show their brilliance by making the best lemonade from the lemons they get to work with - maximising them; optimising them; extracting every sinew from them; making them look like something to be reckoned with, even, leaving you in no doubt that with better players, the trajectory is certain and upward because the same 'trick' will be pulled again in a positive swing - it's games like yesterday's that show what Klopp brings moreso than what his sides look like at full strength; you should have that feeling about your coach more often than not, if he's good at his job; that you're likely to get a premium product no matter what is at his disposal. Results can come in and out of the picture, but overall, the feeling is this guy is getting as much as can be expected from this bunch of players the vast majority of the time.
The feeling should be that no matter whether your eyes and mind likes the product you're watching, there's no question that the coaching is on point and at the higher end of the spectrum, which is what the top coaches get paid to implement. LVG's football might not have been everyone's cup of tea, but at no point in his entire tenure could his coaching itself be questioned. I feel LVG needs to be inserted into this, just in case Klopp is looked at as some kind of freak outlier or 'generational' so not counting in the normal scheme of things. It's all the same. The crux is what their coaching brings to the table in its own right before anything else needs to be factored in.
