LONDON — On a night when the Premier League title was being decided in Manchester, Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool were many miles away, both literally and figuratively. They needed to come from behind in east London to rescue their hopes of qualifying for the Champions League next season. Those hopes, even after a narrow 2-1 win at West Ham United, remain hanging by a thread.
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There is no doubt it will be an uphill battle. Still trailing six points behind Manchester United and Newcastle United, who both have at least a game in hand, Klopp continues to publicly dispel any notion of a race for the top four. “I can’t see it,” he said postmatch. But some players still hold faith. Last week, Fabinho told ESPN Brasil that Liverpool can still do it, but he admitted there was no room for error. Maybe that is putting it lightly.
“I want at least for a few weeks for us to show our real face,” Klopp told reporters at the London Stadium. “We have gone from an ugly one, a nice one, ugly one, nice one. We’ve shown it for three games.”
That has been the story of Liverpool’s season. In a year that has featured a 9-0 victory over Bournemouth and a 7-0 win over Manchester United, there have been shock losses, too: a 2-1 home defeat to Leeds United, a 3-1 mauling at Brentford, a 3-0 capitulation at Brighton & Hove Albion. Now, Klopp’s side badly need to achieve what they have struggled to all season: consistency. It used to be Liverpool’s hallmark. Last year, they won 16 of their last 18 league games to end the campaign, yet they entered this late-April fixture at West Ham having not won three games in a row since November.
In the opening stages at the London Stadium, it looked as if that trend would continue. West Ham’s Jarrod Bowen should have done better with a cross inside five minutes that would have allowed Michail Antonio an easy headed chance, before Lucas Paqueta danced his way through the Liverpool midfield and delivered a thumping effort from 25 yards. Liverpool fears mounted, only to be quelled at the other end by a piercing low strike from Cody Gakpo from a similar distance that found the bottom-left corner and levelled the score. “What a screamer,” Klopp said of Paqueta’s 12th-minute opener before adding: “We kept playing, and we scored our screamer as well.”
