The aura has gone but can Jürgen Klopp summon another great age at Liverpool?

A lmost all managerial lives end in failure. That’s the nature of the job, or at least of the way modern football tends to interpret it. You arrive and you win, or you are ousted. And if you win, you had better keep on winning, or you’ll be ousted.

There are very few second acts in modern English football, at least not at the same club. Bill Shankly had one, defeat by Watford in the FA Cup in 1970 bringing him to the belated acceptance that his first great Liverpool side was over and he needed to build another. But that was Shankly, and that was then. Today’s pressures are different: everything moves much quicker.

If anybody now has the sort of credit in the bank that Shankly had then, it is Jürgen Klopp, but there is a melancholy about Liverpool these days.

Wednesday’s home win against Wolves took them up to sixth but the defeat by Real Madrid and the draw at Crystal Palace perhaps gave a truer impression of Liverpool’s level. They face Manchester United on Sunday and it feels the balance of power in their rivalry may have shifted. There is an awareness for Liverpool that an era could be coming to an end.

It may not, however. Klopp pulled Liverpool out of a similar situation two seasons ago and last season was two games from being the greatest they or any other club has ever had. But everybody is older now, the threads have begun to fray and Sadio Mané has departed. Klopp himself is showing signs of strain, occasionally snappish, often weary.

The danger for a managerial great is to hang on because there is such a faith in his abilities: he was the messiah once and he can be again. But cults of personality are dangerous: blind allegiance to a manager obscures the other factors that make a successful club. And managers