Liverpool bereft of a superstar, and shining brighter than ever because of it

Eighteen years ago, a terrified Steven Gerrard scampered onto the Anfield pitch for the first time. “I was sh*tting myself,” was how he recalled the occasion.

He needn’t have been: almost instantly, his match-winning talent was clear; the flip-side was that his team came to rely on it just as quickly. And since then, for better or worse, Liverpool has been a club wedded to the idea of a talisman.

Throughout swathes of the Houllier era, Anfield played host to a weekly one-man show as Liverpool’s captain hauled his side to comically undeserved wins with the sort of all-action performances that belonged in a John Woo movie rather than a football match. Gerrard’s tornado-like ability to tear through teams on his own provided some of the most awesome spectacles in Liverpool’s modern era, but they reflected a wildly dysfunctional team.

Rafa Benitez rectified this to an extent but even his best sides relied heavily on a tiny contingent. Gerrard and Fernando Torres sparked up an irrepressible partnership in 2008/09 and scored 30 goals between them, but they missed 26 league games between them too, and Liverpool ended the campaign four points short of a title. When Xabi Alonso departed that summer, the team disintegrated.

Half a decade later, and another title charge, Liverpool’s momentum again founded on a blitzkrieg forward pairing: more than half of their 101 goals in 2013/14 came via the snake hips of Daniel Sturridge and the frothing lunacy of Luis Suarez.

It was a thrill-a-minute model but hardly a sustainable one and when Catalunya came a-calling for Suarez, who had assumed the role of talisman from his skipper in a practical if not symbolic sense, there were predictably dire consequences – not least in heaving the goalscoring burden onto the fragile shoulders of Sturridge. He started just seven league games the following season as Liverpool sunk to sixth and 101 league goals became 52. As with Gerrard and Torres before him, every knock taken by Sturridge prompted an entire fanbase to channel the fraught fervour of an 18-year-old Gerrard.

A year and a bit on, and things are once again the same, and yet very different. Again, Liverpool are flying, again the goals are flowing. But under the rule of Jurgen Klopp the talisman is nowhere to be seen. Liverpool are the division’s top scorers in 2016, but those 50 goals have been shared around 17 players, with only Roberto Firmino, who has 11, even threatening double figures (Sturridge and Adam Lallana are next with six each).

But Klopp’s collectivism runs beyond the names on the scoresheet. There’s now no single player whose absence would prompt panic. Last season’s champions have already been taken to the cleaners with Philippe Coutinho, arguably the club’s purest talent, watching on from the bench, while a similar demolition job was applied to last season’s runners-up without the aid of Sturridge, who’d be Coutinho’s hottest competition for the mantle. Firmino, the foraging forward central to both those batterings, was absent for Friday’s trip to Chelsea but neither performance nor result suffered.

It works in other ways, as well: Alberto Moreno’s early-season buffoonery has seen James Milner slot into the full-back role as both replacement and upgrade. With Georginio Wijnaldum improving every game, Emre Can - the matinee-idol midfield stroller - can’t expect an automatic return to the side.

It’s a framework that allows for Mamadou Sakho, last season’s most impressive defender, to be exiled at the manager’s behest without results being compromised. Or for Daniel Sturridge to be given the freedom to play only when he feels his body is up to it, and not risk being made a pariah.

Of course, much of Liverpool’s no-stars policy is not policy at all, but simple circumstance. A large part of why Liverpool lack luminaries is because they can’t afford them. With today’s top talents increasingly hoarded by a vanishingly small group of financial juggernauts, Klopp’s collectivism is as much a necessity as a virtue.

The likes of Mario Gotze have been pursued without success, so there’s an element of crowd-pleasing to Klopp’s claim that “other clubs can go out and spend more money and collect top players. I want to do it differently. I would even do it differently if I could spend that money”.

But even so, it’s undeniable that his MO differs from the Harlem Globetrotters model expounded by Florentino Perez, Ed Woodward and co. None of those men set out to create a team of pugnacious underdogs, whereas Klopp’s aim is precisely that.

His ideals were voiced in July, while discussing the feats of Iceland and Wales at the Euros: “There were wonderful examples of what football really is – about building a team, creating a bond between the team, supporters and whole countries. That was the best example of how football can work.”

Liverpool are hardly footballing paupers in the Wales or Iceland mould, but for the man looking to mount a title charge in Liverpool’s post-Gerrard, post-Suarez era, his most telling point came in his analysis of the eventual winners, Portugal: “I thought ‘OK they deserve it’. They lost their most important player and it was another wonderful sign how a team can work. They really did something special.”

Whether or not Klopp’s Liverpool can do the same remains to be seen. But with the club finally cured of its dependence on a talisman, anxiety levels in the Kop are unlikely to match those of a certain debutant of two decades ago.