While every match Liverpool play between now and the end of the season has the potential to be hugely important to their trophy-gathering aims, there is no question that their trip to the Etihad Stadium looms largest on the horizon.
You only have to witness the social media furore brought about by the announcement of the match officials to see just how important the fixture with Manchester City is set to be. It doesn’t matter that both teams will have a further seven league fixtures to navigate afterwards, the match is being viewed by many as a definitive title decider.
Jurgen Klopp won’t be thinking that way with matches against three other top eight sides still to come, but there’s no doubt a game with City is the most tactically challenging there is. How best to negate their goal threat while remaining potent at the other end?
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For three seasons between 2017/18 and 2019/20, the Reds’ front three picked itself for any match of significance. Time moves on though, and both Luis Diaz and Diogo Jota could easily be included in Klopp’s starting XI for Liverpool’s titanic tussle against the blue half of Manchester.
The manager will obviously have to see who is fit after the match with Benfica on Tuesday night but there were aspects of the 2-0 win over Watford which augured well for the game with City. “The counter-press today was the best I saw for a long time,” Klopp said after the match and there was one player in particular who contributed greatly to that.
Statsbomb have revealed that Roberto Firmino made more tackles and more pressure regains than any other player in the Premier League last weekend. He made nine of the former and 14 of the latter and both are figures rarely touched by any player.
The Brazilian’s tackle total was actually a new personal best, at least for the period in which FBRef carry Statsbomb data, dating back to the start of the 2017/18 campaign. In a 4-1 win at West Ham that season Firmino made seven tackles, but prior to the Watford victory he hadn’t recorded more than four in a league game since.
It’s also the most tackles by a Liverpool player in any league or European match in 2021/22, and it was only matched once last season, when Trent Alexander-Arnold made 10 in the 3-1 defeat at the King Power Stadium.
The pressure regains statistic is slightly different, as one is recorded when a team recovers the ball within five seconds of a player pressing an opponent. Possession does not have to be regained by the player who presses, but clearly if one logs plenty of these actions then it means the team’s press is working well when that person closes down the opposition.
Firmino has had higher totals in the past. He recorded 17 pressure regains in a 2-0 win over Chelsea in 2019 – a game best remembered for a thunderbolt long-range goal by Mohamed Salah – and also in a Champions League draw with Napoli later that year. Similarly, there have been instances of Liverpool teammates making more than 14 both last season and this, with Naby Keita’s 16 at Tottenham the current benchmark for this campaign.
But in none of those games did the Reds match the 73 percent possession which they recorded against the Hornets. Liverpool only attempted a greater share of the passes in 24 of their preceding 249 league games under Klopp, meaning Firmino was recording elite pressing and tackle numbers despite rarely having fewer opportunities in a match to win the ball.
His figures still need to be placed into context. Watford might be a touch more press resistant under Roy Hodgson than they were under Claudio Ranieri, but they still hold the worst opposition pressure success rate in the Premier League.
And that’s a table which Manchester City unsurprisingly top. Yet if Klopp viewed the match on Saturday as Firmino’s audition for a spot in his team at the Etihad, then from a defensive perspective the Reds’ number nine passed with flying colours.
Firmino was seemingly missing from Friday's training session judging by the set of images released by the club. But if all is well and that absence was not injury related, don't be surprised if he makes a big impact in the Sunday showdown.
