Jürgen Klopp came to Liverpool promising "full-throttle football" and at White Hart Lane on Saturday afternoon, his players tried eagerly to deliver it. Liverpool were like a car with a brick on the accelerator but nobody behind the steering wheel.

Klopp's high-tempo pressing game demands a lot of his players, particularly those in the attacking positions. You had to feel for Philippe Coutinho, who had resembled a man trying to run across a ploughed field in the rain for several minutes before he was finally substituted.

Liverpool had gone after Spurs in their own half and at times succeeded in creating a kind of flailing chaos around the Spurs box but neither Coutinho nor Adam Lallana had been able to shape it to Liverpool's advantage.

It was a performance high in effort but low on quality. Klopp found a typically upbeat way to describe Liverpool’s shortcomings: “We did not use our skills.” Only time and transfer windows will tell whether he really believes the current group of players really possesses the skills he’s looking for.

In the limelight

Meanwhile, Klopp’s own skill set is going to be tested. He made his reputation partly through his performances as a TV pundit and he’s always appeared comfortable in the limelight, but there have been times over the last week when he’s seemed surprised by the sheer size of the media circus that now surrounds the big English clubs.

As Klopp stood on the grass at White Hart Lane watching his players warm up, a TV camera pointed at his face orbited him in slow dramatic circles. Welcome to the Premier League.

There are so many different channels and questions and angles and once a manager is done dealing with all of those, he goes out to get something to eat and everyone comes over for a selfie to put on their Facebook.

Klopp revealed that week that he's already started refusing photo requests because they all end up on social media and in aggregate create the impression that he spends all his time living it up in town. Bill Shankly never had to deal with this.

So far almost all the media coverage of Klopp has been hugely positive, but by its very nature, it can't stay that way for long. Writing in the Daily Telegraph over the weekend, Gary Neville had complained about the way English football had spent the week grovelling before Klopp. "I bet Klopp can't believe it," Neville said, "if a German manager went to Spain there's no way the Spanish media would react that way."

Neville traced the causes of Kloppmania to English football’s lack of self-esteem, and maybe there’s the germ of a point there. It is probably true that deep down, most English football people believe foreigners do it better, and it’s hard to see how anyone who watches international football could rationally disagree.

At the same time, Neville seemed to be missing the point that Klopp is not just any manager. He was hailed as a hero not because he's a German manager, but because he is Jürgen Klopp. He's not the first German to manage in England, but English football didn't fling itself at the feet of Felix Magath when he took over at Fulham.

Records and reputation

It could also be noted that Pep Guardiola’s reception upon taking over at

Bayern Munich

was hardly any less fawning than Klopp’s at Liverpool. There are only a few managers whose records and reputations command that sort of respect around

Europe

, and Jürgen Klopp is one of them.

So Klopp instantly commands his players' attention, and that much was already clear at White Hart Lane. It remains to be seen whether his methods will meet with the same sort of success in the Premier League as they initially did in Germany.

When Dortmund won those two titles in 2011 and 2012, very few teams in Germany were using the high press. Now almost every Bundesliga team uses it. What was revolutionary became conventional. In the arms race of football, you don’t get to hold onto any tactical advantage for long.

By the end of his time at Dortmund the tactics had stopped getting results. And they won’t surprise anyone in the Premier League, where high-tempo football has always been the norm.

But Klopp’s success did not flow entirely, or even mostly, from this tactical idea. The thing that really set him apart was his gift for framing things in a positive way and sounding as though he really meant it. That, as much as any tactical innovation, is how he drew great performances out of his players.

Forced to play

There was an example of it at his unveiling when he described the Liverpool job as “the most interesting job in world football.” There was another example on Saturday in his handling of questions around the injury to

Daniel Sturridge

and the fact that he had been forced to play Divock Origi.

Rather than succumb to the temptation to bemoan the absence of Sturridge, who is clearly far better than Origi, Klopp first delivered a coded message to Sturridge by saying he never thinks about injured players. Then he talked about how he might have signed Origi for Dortmund if he hadn’t been too expensive.

Watching Origi scramble about the pitch like a newborn foal who was still in that stage where it is trying to make sense of the world, you wondered whether Dortmund really had taken their interest far enough to be quoted a price.

But, much like his new team on Saturday, Klopp had played it about as well as he could.