Fast-forward four months, and every game for Liverpool is "crunch time," starting Saturday when second-place (shudder) Tottenham surge into Anfield while Klopp's vision -- of returning the fallen Reds giant of the Kenny Dalglish era to the summit of domestic and European football -- hangs by a thread of his trademark tracksuit.

These are testing times on Merseyside for Herr Klopp, who perhaps more than any other manager of his generation has enjoyed an almost unconditional bromance with his teams' supporters, a love amplified by his feel-good vibes and aggressive, high-energy tactics.

When he left Mainz after 18 years as a player and coach, the club threw him a goodbye party that lasted for a week. In his final home game as manager of Borussia Dortmund, fans in the club's famous Yellow Wall terrace unveiled a massive banner emblazoned with a single word: Danke.

No one knows how or when (he recently signed a six-year contract extension) Anfield will bid farewell to Klopp, but a couple of worrisome tableaus emerged in the past week that indicate the unrelenting pressure of Being Liverpool is wearing away at his uber-cool façade:

• Klopp, his face twisted with rage, getting up in the face of an assistant referee on the touchline and hissing "nobody can beat us" after Liverpool was hard done by in the buildup to Chelsea striker Diego Costa's penalty kick in the 1-1 draw with the Blues. It was a result, by the way, that avoided four consecutive defeats at home for the first time since 1923.

• Klopp engaging in a furious tete-a-tete with a supporter behind the Liverpool dugout who complained loudly about a back-pass to the goalkeeper at a time when the team was trailing Chelsea 1-0.

"Keep your nerve, please," my favorite German snapped back in the sanitised version. "It's still football."

Yes, but it's no longer the kind of effervescent, attacking football that had set Anfield alight this past autumn as they ascended to the top of the table for the first time since May 2014, a perilous journey that ended with The Slip Seen Around the World.

What a love affair Klopp enjoyed with the Kop back then as the goals flew in -- a whopping 30 in the team's first 11 games -- and wins over Arsenal, Chelsea and Spurs stoked the herd into a frenzy of hope. Could Liverpool's agonizing 27-year wait for a 19th league title be about to end thanks to Klopp's tactical wizardry and infectious charisma? As an Arsenal fan, I always know the answer to this particular line of questions, but others foolishly saw it differently.

"From the teams we've played," said Watford manager Walter Mazzarri at the beginning of November, having already faced Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United, "there's no doubt Liverpool is the team I'm most impressed with."

Certainly, no one, least of all Klopp, could envision how drastically Liverpool's fortunes would turn as 2017 dawned. The Reds have won one of 10 games in all competitions since Jan. 2 and they needed two stumbling efforts to achieve that lone victory, eking out a 1-0 win over League Two side Plymouth Argyle in a third-round FA Cup replay. It's the team's worst start to a calendar year since the great relegation debacle of 1954, and Klopp has gone to great pains to keep smiling through the apocalypse.

"Even though at this moment it feels really bad, it's not the biggest problem in the world," he said after Liverpool's limp 2-0 capitulation to Hull City, a relegation-battling side that Liverpool thumped 5-1 in September. "There are solutions, 100 percent."

If the answers exist, he needs to pencil them in quickly since matches against Arsenal, Manchester City and Everton loom after Saturday's clash with Spurs. On the plus side, Liverpool tend to ratchet up their game against the top six -- they've dropped only eight points against their five closest rivals.

But the lower-ranked teams -- in addition to Hull, Liverpool have lost to Bournemouth, Swansea and Burnley in the league as well as Championship side Wolverhampton Wanderers in the FA Cup fourth round -- have proved their downfall, which suggests that either:

1. Klopp has instilled a level of mental toughness in his squad that can be best described as Wenger-esque.

2. Dortmund's longtime favourite son believes his players are better than they really are, the same delusion that his Anfield predecessor, Brendan Rodgers, also fell victim to, albeit with one crucial difference: Rodgers had Luis Suarez to paper over all the cracks.

Normally, in these break-glass-in-case-of-emergency circumstances, the big clubs wave their chequebooks around Europe or South America during the transfer window in an attempt to find a quick, if expensive, fix. But that philosophy is not shared by Liverpool's risk-averse owners, Fenway Sports Group. If Klopp is to succeed in realising his paymaster's minimum ambition of securing a Champions League berth -- Liverpool are currently in fifth place, one point out of the qualifying top four -- he must do so with the players at his disposal. Given the recent form of several of these players -- Simon Mignolet, Alberto Moreno, Emre Can and Daniel Sturridge come immediately to mind - they would be hard-pressed to play on either side of the Mersey.

You can make the case -- as have many of Klopp's critics -- that the Liverpool manager has gegenpressed his players into physical and mental exhaustion, and that his remorselessly intense style of chasing and harrying for 90 minutes is simply not sustainable in the attritional Premier League, where there's no winter break and opponents seldom pause for a breath.

Yet manager Mauricio Pochettino employs a similar full-throttle approach with a more consistently successful Spurs side. The difference is that the Argentinian has spent two and a half years building his team from the back, starting with world-class keeper Hugo Lloris and a rearguard second to none in the Premier League. With that kind of solid foundation, Spurs can push high up the field to press their opponents and not have to worry that the players behind them will suffer a nervous breakdown when the other team hits them on the counterattack.

It is almost inconceivable that neither Klopp nor Rodgers successfully closed the long-running circus show that passes for Liverpool's goalkeeping. Not since Pepe Reina, the team's No. 1 for eight years, left Anfield in 2013 has a Reds keeper been anything above the level of mildly useless. Klopp's attempt to rectify the situation involved bringing in promising young German keeper Loris Karius to replace the howler-prone Mignolet, before the manager lost faith in his compatriot and went back to the Belgian's flapping talents.

The result is that no other top team in the Prem has surrendered more points due to the slapstick displays of the men between the posts, and this is a league that counts Claudio Bravo among its starting keepers.

Surely, Klopp will cajole Liverpool's reluctant-to-splurge owners to invest in an elite keeper over the summer -- Joe Hart, please pick up the white courtesy phone -- but by then they are liable to find themselves outside the Champions League once more. That would be a cruel blow to Klopp, who has never shirked responsibility for his team's underachieving season, a rare and admirable trait in a Premier League manager. (See Wenger, Pep Guardiola and all post-Sir Alex Ferguson Man United bosses.)

"What I think is very important is to never blame anybody else for your own mistakes," Klopp said last week. "We don't look for excuses."

What they are looking for is someone who can supply a cutting edge to an attack that appears to have lost its thrilling early-season mojo. Liverpool's overreliance on leading scorer Sadio Mane (nine goals, four assists) was painfully evident when the Senegalese striker sped off to the African Nations Cup. The thought that Roberto Firmino, Adam Lallana, Divock Origi and Sturridge would step up in Mane's absence proved the maxim, "Hope is not a strategy".

Without Mane's pace and audacity in the final third, Liverpool scored just five goals in seven games in all competitions and managed only one win -- against third-tier Plymouth Argyle.

Yet Klopp has been here before with Mainz and Dortmund, who despite their ballyhooed successes both struggled badly at times during his tenure. It is a testament to his unshakable self-belief and irresistible magnetism that I'm betting on him to restore Liverpool's swagger and win back those back-pass-protesting doom merchants who fail to realise how lucky they are to have such a refreshing and determined character in charge.

It may qualify as wishful thinking on my part -- it's Tottenham, after all -- but come Saturday I fully expect to see Klopp execute some glorious scissor kicks on the touchline.