SOUNESS: Liverpool have new lease of life & great to see them on the march again

It was my privilege to work for nine years at Liverpool, as both player and manager, and I came to know that the passion of the supporters there is different to all but a handful of football clubs in the UK.

For those fans, the club is everything. The team’s results have an impact on their contentment, their welfare, in some cases even their health. You see it in the faces of those who hang around the stadium on non-match days. Sometimes hundreds of people, just walking around the place. I’m sure Jurgen Klopp will have felt that weight of responsibility when results were not going the club’s way last season.

It will have been a very long summer for him, looking to get the right players in, hoping they will gel, sensing the local expectation that Liverpool would go toe-to-toe with Manchester City once again. And though these are early days – all September football discussion must carry that caveat – I have to say that I very much like what I see. A Liverpool team unbeaten, second in the table, enjoying a new lease of life.

It’s not been a total rebuild because in all the vital areas, the side was already established. Great goalkeeper. Great centre half. And the hardest thing of all to get: the guys who put the ball in the back of the net. But that squad has required radical surgery in midfield – an area which I said in these pages, on August 13 last year, needed renewing.

I now see a midfield who are more skilled, extremely technically gifted, and yet still have the high work-rate of their predecessors. The best midfield in the eight years Klopp has been at the club consisted of Gigi Wijnaldum, Jordan Henderson and James Milner. That unit was extremely aggressive; constantly putting the opposite mid-field under pressure to