On Thursday night, $21m (£16m/€19m) summer signing Wataru Endō made his European debut for Liverpool, and just his second start for the club all told, as the Reds took on LASK in Austria.
As it stands, Endō isn’t the first-choice for Klopp in the defensive midfield position, with Alexis Mac Allister favored for the last two Premier League matches against Aston Villa and Wolves after the former Stuttgart man made his first start in the competition against Newcastle United last month.
Unfortunately, he didn’t make much of a case to move up the pecking order here, turning in a fairly anonymous performance on both sides of the ball. The Japan international ranked ninth among Liverpool’s starters for touches (48), and eighth for completed passes (30), and only managed to win one ground duel, having contested four.
Endō would be substituted at the hour mark (admittedly, that contributed to his low numbers, but he hadn’t necessarily done enough to merit staying on longer), and Liverpool’s improvement with Mac Allister and Dominik Szoboszlai on the pitch was significant, even if the state of the game was more favorable at that point after the Reds found their equalizer.
The reality was that those two, both new signings themselves, were much better suited to this game as players capable of opening up a defense. While Endō is generally tidy in possession, he’s not particularly expansive, instead fitting more into the Fabinho mold of a destroyer.
We can expect virtually all of Liverpool’s Europa League group games to follow a similar pattern to Thursday’s opener, with Liverpool dominating possession and trying to break a team down, and this presents Klopp with something of a conundrum. He confidently heralded the arrival of Endō as a ‘genius strike’, but while games in the cup competitions would appear to be his best route into the team, he may not be best-equipped for them.
Instead, Endō could come into his own in games where Liverpool is less dominant. We’ve already written that he could potentially be a big-game player for Klopp, much like Bernardo Silva is for Pep Guardiola, having started seven out of nine games against the ‘big six’ last season before City sealed the title, even though he was far from a guaranteed pick elsewhere.
The 30-year-old is an expert at breaking things up, having won possession 706 times across his three seasons in the Bundesliga, the second-highest figure in the competition during that period.
You can afford to go bolder against the weaker sides, playing predominant number eights like Mac Allister, Szoboszlai or Curtis Jones in a defensive midfield two, but when top teams try to control possession against Liverpool, Endō could demonstrate his value by offering a higher level of defensive security, which will be much more im
Intriguingly, a couple of the Reds’ upcoming games — they face Spurs away at the end of the month and then go to Brighton a week later — could fit this bill. It may be in those tricky tests on the road that the shock move for Endō starts to pay off
