Leo Lin's free kick rocketed into the net!
Commentary booths exploded.
The live stream erupted.
Anfield erupted with them.
Leo Lin sprinted to the touchline, tore off his jersey, and held it up proudly to the stands.
"This is Anfield!"
"This is Liverpool!"
"Lin!"
"Anfield's savior!"
"He represents the spirit of Liverpool!"
"He represents Liverpool's attitude!"
"He represents the soul of this club!"
The crowd was on the verge of madness. They had completely fallen for Leo Lin.
Liverpool fans celebrated with everything they had, again and again.
Only after a long, wild celebration did the players finally return to their own half. Very little time remained.
Manchester City refused to concede. They threw numbers forward, desperate for another goal, but the final whistle arrived soon after.
"Ladies and gentlemen, this intense battle has come to an end!"
"Liverpool have successfully defended their place at the top of the table—they now hold the initiative in the title race!"
On the sidelines, Guardiola and Klopp embraced. Guardiola couldn't help glancing toward Leo Lin.
"How much would it take for you to sell Leo Lin to Manchester City? I'll offer a price you can't refuse."
Klopp smiled.
"Even if you offered to be my assistant coach, I still wouldn't sell Lin to Manchester City."
The broadcast cut to Leo Lin—the man of the match.
A hat-trick in a single game. Another milestone in his career.
Media outlets poured out their praise.
"The combined potential of every player in Manchester doesn't equal Lin's alone!"
Despite holding onto first place, Klopp couldn't feel at ease.
Guardiola's brand-new tactics were frighteningly strong.
After the match against Manchester City, Liverpool had a full six days of rest before facing Southampton—currently in excellent form in the Premier League—in the fourth round of the FA Cup.
The players went home to recover.
Klopp couldn't.
He had to find a way to ensure his players would never again envy Manchester City's new tactical system.
He locked himself in the coaching room with his assistants and several analysts, diving into an all-night study session.
Apart from the occasional phone call—especially those made in the early hours to check whether his wife was home alone—Klopp and Krawietz devoted themselves entirely to researching a new tactical framework.
Back in Dortmund, they often clashed like this on the tactical front. One would propose a new idea, the other would tear it down, and once dismantled, the first would counter-dismantle it. Through repeated cycles of destruction and reconstruction, they searched for systems that simply couldn't be broken.
They found that old Dortmund rhythm again.
On the table sat two high-precision advanced data analysis systems and tactical evolution devices. With match footage constantly shifting on the projector, Klopp and Krawietz analyzed almost frame by frame.
Finally.
Three days. Seventy-two hours.
The tactical storm ended.
Early on the fourth morning, Leo Lin happened to walk past the head coach's office.
The moment Klopp and Krawietz opened the door, they startled him.
A foul stench poured out. With their hair in disarray and eyes bloodshot, the two men looked so haggard that Leo Lin briefly wondered whether they were hiding a corpse inside.
And that corpse's name was probably Pep Guardiola.
"Coach Klopp?!"
"Krawietz??"
"Are you two okay?"
The news spread quickly among the squad. When the players gathered at the office and saw the pair in such a state, shock was written all over their faces.
At 2 p.m., Liverpool officially began tactical training.
Klopp looked noticeably more composed now. Holding his tactical notebook, he addressed the team.
"Starting today, we're changing the tone of our overall tactical system."
By "overall tactics," he meant the fundamental framework governing the team's attacking, defensive, and transitional play.
Previously, Liverpool had emphasized high press and wing breakthroughs, using width to fuel rapid Counterattacks.
Klopp continued.
"From today onward, our match approach will be high press combined with positional defense, shifting pressure, and dynamic transitions."
The first three concepts were familiar to the players. But when the fourth term appeared, even Leo Lin frowned.
Dynamic transitions?
He'd never heard of it.
If Klopp hadn't been standing right there, Leo Lin might have thought the three days of self-imposed lockdown had driven both men insane.
But Klopp immediately began training.
The players moved from confusion to clarity as Klopp and Krawietz worked one-on-one with them, helping each Liverpool player understand exactly what to do on the pitch and how to adjust their movement.
Gradually, Leo Lin's astonishment deepened.
He realized Klopp wasn't just tweaking details.
He was changing the team's foundational tone.
Not just Liverpool's foundation—
the traditional foundation of football tactics.
If Pep Guardiola's new system had challenged conventional positional roles, then Klopp was trying to overturn the very roots of tactical structure.
On a football pitch, the tactical positions of the eleven players have always been rigid. Even shifting Defensive Midfielders from Center Back into Defensive Midfield or Attacking Midfield merely altered individual movement patterns within an existing framework.
But Klopp's so-called dynamic transitions, revealed gradually through Liverpool's intense training, showed their true form.
In attack, Mané and Salah would independently decide when to switch positions in the front line.
Firmino would constantly expand his movement within the Striker zone.
The Center Backs—led primarily by Lovren—would step forward as a unit during attacks, establishing positional defense higher up the pitch to inject greater energy into the high press system.
Midfielders would execute frequent curved positional shifts to apply pressure, ensuring that dynamic transitions constantly formed between central players, wingers, and advancing fullbacks.
This kind of transition was fluid.
Unlike traditional rotational tactics, the positions and directions weren't fixed. The overall movement was far more flexible.
Take, for example, Pep Guardiola's dense short-passing approach during the Dream Barcelona era. In essence, it was an upgrade of traditional transition play.
Guardiola created tighter passing networks between midfielders and wide players, disrupting opponents by constantly varying the tempo—sometimes slow, sometimes quick.
But that system still operated within the limits of conventional transitions. When Dream Barcelona shifted through midfield, the movement was largely small-scale and localized.
Klopp's dynamic transitions, however, operated on a much larger scale.
They involved the entire team.
He had taken Pep Guardiola's midfield transitional framework and pushed it one step further.
He had created dynamic transition tactics.