Back in September, Burnley beat Watford 2-0 on a Monday night in a game broadcast live on Sky Sports.Burnley v Watford at Turf Moor is hardly the kind of game to draw an audience, though. And about a month later, in mid-October, Sky announced that the audiences for their Premier League football games had dropped by almost a fifth compared to the same stage in the previous season. A drop explained in part, Sky have said, by the Olympic Games, the warm summer, and a lack of any traditionally major games in the first few weeks of the season.The broadcaster was surely aware of the viewing figure problems by mid-September, and also surely aware that Burnley and Watford weren’t likely to fix them. But Sky had a plan: one of the Premier League’s box office managers of the moment, Jurgen Klopp, was invited onto Monday Night Football to appear alongside Jamie Carragher.A Liverpool legend turned one of the best-known pundits on TV in Jamie Carragher, alongside the current Liverpool manager and one of the best-known bosses in the game in Jurgen Klopp would provide big ratings at any time. And it certainly provided an artificial boost to Sky at a time when they were probably grateful for it. Looking back on it, it’s a clever ploy, and a modern-day truism, too: Sky were just giving the people what they wanted. Burnley and Watford fans aside, you’d imagine.That night, Klopp was asked about his playing days before being cruelly shown a video clip of his younger self-making a terrible mistake. We then learn that this was a crucial game in which mistake was a contributing factor to his team’s defeat. It was a defeat that cost them promotion.

All was forgiven, of course. Klopp’s mistake at Mainz may have cost them promotion, but that wasn’t his only contribution to a club where he spent nearly two decades as a player and a manager. After his playing days ended, not only did he guide Mainz to their first ever appearance in the Bundesliga, but he also brought UEFA Cup qualification, too.

All was forgiven at Liverpool, too. His side may also have favoured playing out from the back, and they may also have made defensive mistakes, but his stock was so high that the obvious joke went untouched.

After Liverpool’s capitulation on the most recent installment of Monday Night Football, though, how would the club’s fans react upon seeing that now?

The manager’s mistake in his playing days hardly sheds any new light on Liverpool’s dismal start to 2017. At best, it’s a funny metaphor. But it is certainly interesting how Klopp’s stock has dropped since then. At the time, perhaps the worst criticism about him on the programme that night was that he was giving away too many of his team’s secrets.

The most worrying part from the defeat to Leicester, Klopp’s last appearance on Monday Night Football, wasn’t that his own team had been found out, but rather that Liverpool seemed incapable of stopping a team that had been found out months ago. Leicester have only pitched in one similar performance all season long – their 4-2 victory over Manchester City.

That night, City played a similar high defensive line to the one we saw Liverpool employ last night. And once again, that played into the hands of a Jamie Vardy inspired Foxes side who won the league last season playing in exactly the same way. The lesson – for most of this season as well as looking back over last – has been defend deep and make sure you don’t allow through balls to split your centre backs, and make sure you don’t allow balls over the top of your defence. It’s simple, really, but Vardy punished them terribly.

The moral of the story, though, is that the Sky approach works. In perhaps the least charitable way possible, you have to think about others before you think about yourself.

Jurgen Klopp told Geoff Shreeves after the game, “Looking at the game, you’d have thought that we never spoke about the strength of Leicester.†And he’s right. It looked like Liverpool didn’t care about Leicester’s gameplan, only their own. And they never got going. Had they been more pragmatic, maybe they could have stifled a team in the relegation zone, who had just sacked their manager, and who have looked so woefully impotent for most of the season.

Back in September, Klopp was a hero, but five months is a long time in football.

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