The Liverpool players celebrate Mo Salah’s away goal against Manchester City, a strike which effectively killed the tie as a contest

A Wednesday morning in mid-August and Jürgen Klopp cut an unusually agitated figure. Liverpool were preparing for their Champions League qualifying game away to Hoffenheim, a boom-or-bust match that would be played against the backdrop of a testing pre-season schedule, one in which preparations had been disrupted by an untimely transfer request and serious injury. And now there was one more headache to compound matters.

Back in England, the impression was that Liverpool’s opponents were mere cannon fodder. But under Julian Nagelsmann, the bright young thing of coaching and who shares, in Marc Kosicke, the same agent as Klopp, the German side had made impressive strides that marked them out as dangerous opponents.

Klopp knew that success or failure in this two-legged tie could define