Ken Early: Jürgen Klopp on the brink of a major achievement

Jürgen Klopp stood in the centre circle at St Jakob-Park in Basel and grinned over towards the stands, where he could hear some young kids had struck up a Liverpool chant.

They were local kids – you don't hear many shouts for "Eff-Tzay Leeverpool" at Anfield – but their enthusiasm reflected the global reach of Klopp's new club.

Not many of Liverpool’s supporters around the world would have predicted that the season would end with a European final, but Klopp insists that he always believed his players were good enough to do it.

“I was completely convinced about the quality of the squad, despite the doubts people had,” he told the media in Basel last night.

“Maybe I was the only person, but now I see these players deserve to be in this final.”

By many measures, Liverpool have had a poor season.

Last season they finished sixth in the league with 62 points; this season they were eighth, with 60.

They have lost 10 out of 51 matches since Klopp took over, and they remain defensively unstable. Against Newcastle and Sunderland they led by two goals and yet failed to win.

Against Southampton, they led 2-0 at half-time and contrived to lose – a first for Liverpool in the Premier League era.

But if they are still strangers to consistency, they have become specialists in the spectacular. Seldom can such a mediocre season have been studded with so many memorable moments.

The early wins at Chelsea and City, the extraordinary 5-4 away to Norwich, the last-minute equaliser against Arsenal, the European victory against Manchester United, and most spectacular of all, the 4-3 injury-time win against Borussia Dortmund – one of the greatest matches in Liverpool's European history.

Big matches

There is a sense that under Klopp, Liverpool have found the confidence to compete in big matches again. This had deserted them under Rodgers, who never transmitted the impression that he really believed Liverpool ought to be winning those kinds of matches.

Under the pressure of what he deemed unreasonable expectations, Rodgers’ superficial self-assurance quickly flaked away. By the end, his once-magniloquent rhetoric had grown soggy with weary defeatism.

“We expected to finish within the top five this season, and given our expenditure and wage bill [the fifth-highest in the league], if the season finished tomorrow we’d have hit that target,” was his self-justifying verdict on the disappointing 2015 season.

In his last month at Anfield he memorably proclaimed: “Give me the tools and I will do the work”.

Instead, Liverpool’s owners decided that if Rodgers didn’t think he could succeed with the tools at his disposal, they would go out and find a guy who thought he could.

Under Klopp, Liverpool’s players have proven less willing to accept their own mediocrity.

Most of them have responded to the change of management with improved individual performances. Roberto Firmino is perhaps the most obvious beneficiary of the change.

Rodgers didn’t know what to do with him. Where the previous coach saw another reason to grumble about the transfer committee, Klopp saw a powerful, mobile, two-footed, tactically intelligent goalscorer who works hard for the team. What’s not to like?

Huge moments

It shows how much of what Klopp has achieved so far depends on changing people’s attitudes. Everyone can see that the quality has been uneven, and that much work has to be done before they have a truly dominating team.

But the change of attitude has already helped the players achieve some huge moments, the sort that people will remember, and really, what else is football about?

Out on the pitch at St Jakob-Park, players jogged a couple of warm-up laps in a series of little groups – first Milner, Henderson, Lallana, Allen and Brad Smith, then a Latin group of Coutinho, Firmino, Lucas and Moreno, then Benteke, Toure and Origi, then Clyne, Sturridge, Ojo and Ibe, and lastly a Eurogroup of Can, Skrtel and Dejan Lovren.

The players split up into pairs and kicked balls to each other. After this is usually when you see teams do boxes, with a circle of players passing the ball to each other and two in the middle trying to intercept.

Liverpool did something a bit different. The coaches set up goalposts on the 18-yard line and halfway. In this tight space the squad divided into two teams and played a practice match.

Play would begin with either a corner kick or a throw in, and then both teams would try furiously to score. If they hadn’t managed it after 30 seconds or so, the whistle would go and they would start again from another set-piece.

It was an intense workout, combining set-piece work with a focus on bursting through the opponents’ lines and getting used to the feel of scoring.

Klopp stood by one of the goals and watched, occasionally applauding when somebody produced a particularly brave block or decent shot.

The gift

Klopp might not really believe it when he tells the world that this squad is much better than everyone thinks.

But he has the gift of making it sound like he does, and if his players can deliver Liverpool’s ninth European trophy tonight, he’ll have gone some way to showing that in football, quality is a state of mind.