One of the worst defeats of Klopp’s era, this one will be remembered unfortunately.
Performance, atmosphere, the whole lot of it was below the level needed.
I hope we knew very well what Atalanta would do with their man to man approach, because we faced them in the past and we played also against similar man to man approaches against Brighton and United lately.
But we played so naively, like it was the first time we played against that type of collective defending. We always had an opponent on our backs or chasing us.
It’s not something common (although the mix of zonal and man is rising) and you don’t really have top, top teams doing it, but if you’re not on point with your performance, it can be very tricky to play against.
Sure, we punished such teams in the past, beating Bielsa’s Leeds, Gasperini’s Atalanta (but away), etc. Last night, we seemed unprepared for the fight and unable to adapt during the game.
What you have to do against such defending is movement off the ball. They succeeded in blocking us indiviually. It’s very hard to get your game going, it becomes too wild and too open.
Sure, we (and them) had some chances (Nunez’s miss was horrible, it’s not centimetres, it’s far from the target and simply the wrong way to chip it) and some of our conceded goals were poor, but last night the story was deeper than that.
I didn’t also like that we moved Mac away from LCM to RCM. For what exactly? To allow a totally out of rhythm Jones to play LCM? Against United we went back to Szobo RCM and Mac LCM. If Jones had to or we opted for him to start last night, play him at RCM. Pasalic played a really quality game directly against Mac, he ate him a few times in defensive 1v1 situations.
What could’ve helped also is, when we saw we hardly come out from deep zones, is to move Gakpo (one of the rare players who looked alive last night) centrally and put Nunez inside left, to seach for those spaces more facing the goal.
Gakpo still came deeper to try and create an overload to get us going, but you saw one of Atalanta’s CB’s following him all the way up to our first third of the pitch. And we were still unable to process nicely into at least the second third, let alone the final third.
Changes at HT were needed and expected, but then it was all not enough.
I was disappointed with the way it was like a little catastrophe happening in front of our eyes and both the football and the atmosphere was without a proper answer to it.
It all seemed like “we’re too good to be in this competition and to have issues against a bloody Atalanta”.
We hava a chance to turn it around, but right now I’m thinking Sunday. Next week, I don’t think we’ll have enough. But no doubt we’ll give our all to try and play better, score the first goal, win, equalize, try and overturn it.
Really sad, even somewhat disgraceful if this turns out to be Klopp’s final Anfield European game.
. We will be OK, right 
?