Jurgen Klopp described watching back last season’s Champions League final this weekend as “proper torture” but one suspects it would have been a fair sight worse a few weeks earlier.
For so much of the current campaign, Liverpool have looked a far cry from the outfit that came so close to the quadruple only last season and had Klopp pressed play on his Paris 2022 rewatch in the aftermath of, say, the 3-0 defeat at Wolves earlier this month, one can only imagine the state of the German’s living room by full-time.
Heading into Tuesday’s rematch with Real Madrid, however, Klopp can take comfort in the sense that his team is on the brink of rediscovering itself.
A morale-boosting derby win over Everton was followed by Saturday’s early blitz at Newcastle, with Liverpool hitting their stride just in time for the return of a competition that defines their club like no other - except, of course, their opponents at Anfield.
"I watched the game back, knowing exactly what we will do and we had to win this game,” Klopp said on Monday. "We didn't. The one reason was we didn't score and we conceded but apart from that we should have won the game.
"Analysing it is super easy. It was a little bit of feeling that we needed an extra spark and could have made it.”
A revitalised front three could provide it on Tuesday, Cody Gakpo having scored his first Reds goals in back-to-back games and Darwin Nunez likely to be fit despite suffering a shoulder injury against Newcastle.
