The substitution of Can was the key point for Manchester City. Klopp said he played despite feeling unwell, which makes his performance even more impressive.
Milner has never really shone in the centre of midfield, doing most of his good things for us as a flank player. He was at times left helpless trying to fill the gap left by Can.
I am not having a go at Milner, but I said it in the immediate post match thread, I think it is a measure of how good we have become, that Milner lowered the teams performance, when last season he would have steadied the ship and given us more solidity.
Whether there is an element of his aging frame not being capable, I don’t know, but if Can had been able to play the 90 I feel we would have kept it 4-1 if not sneaked another.
Someone made a point elsewhere about AOC the king he was at Arsenal still, looking around behind him to see who was up for pressing, only to find Firmino had already nicked the ball with two other reds alongside. The lad must be chuffed with how he has fitted into Klopps system.
And it is a system now, with interchangeable parts. Paisley’s teams were able to replace parts of the system, by getting in players to fit. Much talk has been about Coutinho, yet people forget we have played a lot of games without him in the last 18 months - last season a large part saw him injured and finding his form afterwards, yet we were able to play pretty good football.
Taking POPs analogy, we are more like the Stones than the Fab4. We have a replacement drummer (VVD) and a bass player (AOX) and new guitarists, (Salah and Mane) and the lead singer can’t hit the high notes so they use supporting voices. If Keith Richard (Firmino) left then Mick would get someone else in, because the music, whilst the same as before, is being played by different people in a tried and trusted system. Mick being the equivalent of Klopp, he will keep doing it his way