Jamie Carragher makes claim about Liverpool and Jurgen Klopp after watching Tottenham last night

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Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur had different approaches to going down to nine men this season.

The Reds infamously saw two players sent off while visiting the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium earlier in the campaign.

With the same thing happening to Spurs against Chelsea last night, former Liverpool defender Jamie Carragher compared the approaches of Jurgen Klopp and Ange Postecoglou for Sky Sports Monday Night Football.

“Tottenham play with a high line, I have seen it all season, especially against Crystal Palace when I watched them last Friday,” explained the pundit.

“With 11 men you can put pressure on the ball, win the ball high, and this is not just Tottenham – this is lots of teams – you see Liverpool and Aston Villa do it quite a lot.

“But they didn’t do it with nine at Tottenham, Liverpool! They sat back. Tottenham only had nine men and they had a back seven!”

Karma comes back for Spurs

Having already had the rare experience of playing against nine just a few weeks ago, you’d have thought Spurs might have learned a thing or two from Liverpool’s approach.

But as Carragher points out, Postecoglou set his team up in virtually the opposite way to Klopp last night.

Notorious for promoting a fluid style of football, Ange kept true to his principles and told his players to keep doing what they were doing with 11. Unsurprisingly, this turned out to be the wrong thing to do.

Chelsea are hardly the best team on the planet right now, but even Mauricio Pochettino’s beleaguered side managed to stick three more goals past them.

Spurs could indeed have scored a couple of times themselves, but it’s safe to say that Postecoglou’s tactics did not pay off.

Of course, Liverpool didn’t get anything from the game at Spurs either, so you could say that Klopp’s approach didn’t work, too.

But that would be to ignore that the Reds came within a whisker of a quite amazing result back in September. Had Joel Matip directed his foot in a slightly different way in the last second of the game, then Liverpool would have taken home an unlikely point.

Jurgen showed his tactical nous that day. Ange will get praise for sticking to his guns, but for us he was simply naïve.