Likewise Emre Can needs to continue his development during the coming months. He went missing too often at the start of last season, but looked exceptional towards the end of the season. His performance against Villarreal in the Europa League demonstrated extreme maturity as he virtually ran the game from the middle of the park. Him and Henderson in a pivot, taking it in turns to burst forward, will be exciting if they click.<\/p>\n
Georginio Wijnaldum has come in for a not-insignificant transfer fee and will be hoping to prove his worth for the club. Where exactly he\u2019ll play will be an interesting question for Klopp to answer. The player himself has said that number 10 is his preferred position, bursting into the box and supporting attacks. But he\u2019s got a great engine and the manager might want him to use it to link the defence and the attack. He scored eleven goals for a terrible Newcastle side last season so I expect him to be on the end of more than a couple of swift counter-attacks this time around.<\/p>\n
Last but not least comes new-boy Marko Grujic. Signed from Red Star Belgrade for just over \u00a35 million, many thought that the Serbian would be a good squad player for the future. All of the usual pre-season qualifications are in place, but he\u2019s looked really impressive when he\u2019s started so far. He\u2019s a man-mountain of a player who will add real physicality to the team. He said in an interview recently that he plays in the same position as Matic, so that\u2019s interesting. I imagine he\u2019ll come off the bench a lot for the first few months as he gets to grips with the reality of English football, but I expect him to play a big part in our title-winning campaign.<\/p>\n
Emre Can In The Centre Circle v Rubin Kazan<\/p><\/div>\n
Our midfield is really strong if you accept that Klopp wants legs, effort and energy more than he wants a dedicated defensive midfielder. Pivots, box-to-box players and pressing is the order of the day.<\/p>\n
Next time: A look at the attack\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This summer has seen Liverpool\u2019s rivals go crazy in the transfer market, with Manchester City building a really exciting and pacy team for Pep Guardiola to work with, Chelsea spending huge sums on hard-working players that will tick Antonio Conte\u2019s boxes and United doing what Jos\u00e9 Mourinho always does and trying to buy the title. Liverpool haven\u2019t been quiet, as such, but once again the Red half of Merseyside have shunned the opportunity to splash the cash in a major way and instead opted to strengthen the areas that need it in a targeted manner. Whether it\u2019s the right approach […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":281,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=574"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":575,"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574\/revisions\/575"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}