True grit: Jurgen Klopp's Liverpool reinvention gathering pace

Perspective is an easy thing to lose. Most of the talk ahead of Sunday’s meeting at Old Trafford had the hosts down as the team transformed, with Liverpool a side stuck in a rut. And, given that United went into the game having won nine in a row, Liverpool none in three, that talk was hardly baseless.

But looked at from a slightly wider angle, the story didn’t really fly: Jose Mourinho’s United were further off the league’s summit than Louis van Gaal’s dire side were a year ago, while Liverpool began the weekend in second, the division’s top scorers, with their second-highest points tally in the Premier League era. If either club could be said to be renovated and upwardly mobile under their new boss, it was probably the one managed by Jurgen Klopp.

The events of the day arguably bore that out as a draining game ended in deadlock. Waging attritional warfare with a Mourinho side is no easy task but Klopp’s men more than held their own, sticking fervently to an arduous blueprint on hostile turf. United, oscillating from a measured passing game in the first half to a direct long-ball game in the second, resembled a side lacking an identity – or at least, lacking the identity advertised by the United myth.

If coming away from Old Trafford mildly frustrated with a point hints at Liverpool’s progress under Klopp, then Liverpool’s overall record in big away games since the German took over provides irrefutable evidence of the same. Against the rest of the Premier League’s top six, Klopp has played seven, won four and drawn three, with a couple of four-goal routs thrown in for good measure.

Sunday’s game was never going to yield that sort of return and yet Liverpool were still able to demonstrate a characteristic that is, in its own way, every bit as impressive as any well-oiled counterattack.

There is a fundamental gnarliness to this team, something unseen in a Liverpool side since perhaps the 2008/09 season – since the days of Carragher, Kuyt and Mascherano – and even then it was a fleeting trait, quickly washed away by the trickle-down toxicity of parasitic owners. More broadly, grit is something Liverpool have chronically lacked throughout the modern era: the "Spice Boys" moniker was shorthand for exactly that as far back as two decades ago, while Gerard Houllier’s sides could hit desperate ruts once their momentum was interrupted, unable to arrest their slumps.

A quick comparison of Klopp’s above record with that of Rodgers (three wins from 17, nine defeats) or Dalglish (three wins and three defeats from seven), paints a picture of genuine and rapid transformation. Even Benitez, whose teams rarely lacked in defiance or design, lost 12 of his 18 league games at Old Trafford, Stamford Bridge and the Emirates, and won just two.

Generally speaking, those results were due to a deficit in quality – and yet that was no different on Sunday. A combined XI from the starting line-ups on show at Old Trafford might realistically include three Liverpool players. United had the world’s best keeper in goal, an all-time great up front and the Bundesliga player of the year on the wing. They also fielded history’s most expensive teenager and a midfielder whose price tag came close to tripling Liverpool’s all-time record outlay. All three players brought off the bench had been acquired for around the £30m mark.

But Liverpool showed that grit can be every bit as valuable as glitz, more than matching their opponents on the ball and hustling them doggedly off it. Just as Klopp relishes the role of underdog, his teams look happiest when fighting an uphill battle. It’s probably no coincidence that Paul Pogba had his worst game in a United shirt on the day he was up against the buzzard-like Jordan Henderson, nor that Michael Carrick, a masterful orchestrator in recent weeks, was ineffectual when faced with Adam Lallana, and was duly removed at half-time.

Lallana and Henderson are perhaps the two players that best embody the new face of Liverpool under Klopp: there’s silk to their play but there’s real steel, too, in the way they harangue and harass opponents with an infectious relentlessness. Ahead of them, Roberto Firmino provided yet another irritant and forced the revitalised Phil Jones into at least one near-fatal error.

Once or twice, as when Firmino picked Jones’s pocket, Liverpool’s fortitude resulted in excitement and chances. Most of the time though, it didn’t and largely speaking the effects were not eye-catching: passing avenues were shut off, space was denied, opponents were hurried, made to pass backwards instead of forwards. Unspectacular stuff – but all part of a process which had the cumulative effect of levelling the playing field against high-pedigree and in-form opposition.

Much this is down to tactics – counter-pressing and so forth – but there is a substantial mental element to it as well: resilience, will and self-belief are not tangible or quantifiable characteristics but they are ones every bit as vital as fitness and organisation. That a handful of players from both sides were bent double on the final whistle was evidence of a match that had been unrelenting in its intensity, if not especially high on openings.

Perhaps the clearest thing to take from the game is that one side looked more than the sum of their parts, the other less. And at football’s spiritual home of mettle and perseverance, Klopp’s side showed they are rediscovering the qualities that have been lost to them for so long.