Jurgen Klopp has highlighted Liverpool’s luck in keeping so many clean sheets recently. He’s absolutely right, too – but the Reds have earned it.
“It’s just used to getting each other, getting more and more convinced about things and, how I said, luck in the right moment: in life and football, without luck you don’t have a chance,” Klopp said about his team’s defending on Friday (per BBC).
“We have to be honest in these situations, it’s not that we defended completely perfect in the last six games [no goals conceded], there’s a lot of space we have for improvement, but we knew that.”
The game against Tottenham Hotspur is a fine example of that luck. In all honesty, Liverpool shouldn’t have kept a clean sheet and should have conceded at least one. Probably two.
Son Heung-Min had a very good chance to put one past Alisson but fired over. Then Giovani Lo Celso had the goal at his mercy a few yards out but put it wide.
That, undeniably, is luck. Both players should have scored and there was little Liverpool could have done about those shots.
But it’s luck they’ve earned. Liverpool didn’t keep that clean-sheet because Spurs missed those chances as much as they did because they limited Spurs to just two chances.
Fact is, players miss most good chances. No player has a 100% shot conversaion rate – they’re rarely above 50%. Yes, Spurs had particularly good chances but you need only look at Liverpool to see how good chances don’t equal goals.
Both Roberto Firmino and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain missed simple chances in the opening minutes. You can call that lucky or unlucky, too. Fortunately, Liverpool were able to create more after that and scored a winner. That’s the difference.
So the secret at Liverpool isn’t luck – as right as Klopp is about it. It’s that Liverpool allow so few chances that ‘luck’ even comes into it.
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