Jim White says Jurgen Klopp is a pragmatist and the Liverpool manager has worked out a new game plan to tackle Arsenal tonight.

One thing we have learned about Jurgen Klopp since he arrived at Liverpool is this: the man is a pragmatist. I know modern reporting convention insists we should have learned five things by now, but this one is important. Klopp is not a manager stuck in set ways. He is not someone who is rigid in his adherence to a single methodology. The good news for Liverpool fans is that they at least have a manager not hidebound by philosophy.

For sure, Klopp has a style he likes his teams to use. Press, press and press again, force the opposition to cede possession, then keep control of the ball. But if the circumstance is not wholly conducive to that approach, he willingly adapts.

Take tonight’s game with Arsenal. Klopp has admitted there is no point trying to match the Premier League leaders for possession. He appreciates that to do that is to court disaster, ultimately leaving spaces which they will only exploit with the rapidity of their counter attacks. His game plan for this evening is to concentrate on breaking up Arsenal’s possession play rather than trying to lord it. In other words, a different challenge requires a different solution.

It is an admirable approach; intelligent, practical, realistic. Whether it works or not is another issue. But what it demonstrates further is that Klopp is no head-in-the-clouds idealist. He is a man prepared to do whatever is required to win football matches. And that is something Liverpool fans will come to appreciate.

Take his first signings as manager at Anfield. Some less realistic Liverpool supporters might have hoped it would be someone from his past. Someone gilded and grand like Mario Gotze, Ilkay Gundogan or even Robert Lewandowski. Instead it was Marko Grujic, bought from Red Star Belgrade then immediately sent back to Serbia on loan, and now Steven Caulker, signed on loan from Queen’s Park Rangers.

This was not the act of a manager looking to make a statement. This was the act of a manager reacting to circumstance. He has an injury crisis among his centre-backs with Dejan Lovren and Martin Skrtel out for a spell, Kolo Toure hobbling even more than is usual and Mamadou Sakho playing on one leg. And popular as he may be with the Liverpool faithful, Sakho is not able to defend on his own on one leg. So Klopp needed reinforcement.

But even so: Caulker? A player who has twice been relegated from the Premier League and who has made but eight appearances in a wholly unconvincing loan this season at Southampton? It’s not as if he stood out in games he has played against Liverpool: he has been on the receiving end of some 20 goals in just five appearances against the Reds.

Klopp’s decision to go with Caulker, though, is instructive. He needed, he said, someone with Premier League experience to do a very specific job: head the ball. One of the consequences of a pressing game is that it generally obliges the opposition to go long. So a pressing team needs a centre-back capable of putting his forehead to destructive purpose. And Caulker is good at that.

There is something else about the Caulker deal which demonstrates Klopp’s pragmatism, too: the player was recommended by the Liverpool transfer committee. Apparently the quants poring over their statistical logarithms had been tracking him for some time, since long before Klopp arrived at Anfield.

Judging by the more miss than hit nature of their recruitment, Klopp might have been forgiven for ignoring anything they came up with. After all, never mind suggesting Mario Balotelli, these were the guys who apparently persuaded Brendan Rodgers he should invest his credibility in a bunch including Iago Aspas and Oussama Assaidi. Sling your hook might have been Klopp’s instinctive thought when faced with another of their suggestions.

But he is way too astute for that. Whoever was making the recommendation, he saw there might be something in their idea that he could work with. So it is he signed Caulker. Indeed, the signing might be better assessed as demonstration of his self-confidence. Bringing in a bloke on loan from a Championship club may appear from the outside an unambitious start to his rebuilding process. But Klopp made the entirely justifiable assumption that this would be but a bit of emergency sticking plaster. There will be more – and, we can safely predict – better to follow.

Yet however logical it may be, in the modern whirligig of the Premier League, where time is no longer a commodity on which any manager can rely, making Caulker one of his first signings remains a bold call by Klopp. Because of this there is no doubt: even if it is largely now conducted by others, modern managers are judged on the quality of their recruitment.

If a team fails, it is their team, not the one built by the faceless computer nerds in the back room. Rodgers ultimately fell at Anfield because the string of lame acquisitions put together by his advisers could not compensate for the seismic loss of Luis Suarez and Raheem Sterling. It was him who was seen as responsible. If Caulker fumbles and stumbles, Klopp will be held culpable.

The German, though, carries the air of a man who believes he can weather any such critique. Even as his Liverpool team stutters he gives the impression with his tactical nous and commonsense application, that he knows how to bring about wholesale improvement.

Just one thing about his second signing, however. If Caulker, the former Spurs trainee, makes his debut tonight against his old North London rivals, he won’t be doing much heading. However much you might press Arsenal they don’t go long. Liverpool fans – and their manager - are about to find out whether a player considered an expendable luxury by a club mired in the middle of the Championship has anything else to his game.

Source: Euro Sport