Another game, another hatful. After Saturday’s four-goal mauling of Southampton, Liverpool have now scored more than two goals in their past 17 games in all competitions. It is a record in the top flight matched only by Sunderland, way back in 1927.

How have they done it? With the appointment of Ralf Rangnick at Old Trafford, there has been much eulogising about the efficacy of the gegenpress philosophy he invented and Jurgen Klopp embraced. Except pressing alone does not win silverware. Which might explain why Rangnick has more protoges managing in the Premier League than he has collected trophies in his career. What was demonstrated in yet another goal-fest performance by Liverpool is that Klopp’s side do a lot more than chase, harry and close down.

It is not how they get the ball that makes a team winners; it is what they do with it. Which, in the case of Klopp’s Liverpool, is create, pass and move with at times mesmerising efficacy. Their ability to attack comes from everywhere. The full-backs are fliers, the centre-backs (as demonstrated by Virgil van Dijk’s lovely side-footed goal) are finishers, even the goalkeeper is a quarterback distributor.

And the remarkable thing is, Klopp has players who can slot into his system without apparently disturbing its natural flow. The fact Mo Salah and Sadio Mane did not score here (and Roberto Firmino was absent with a hamstring injury) barely affected Liverpool’s progress. Because in Klopp world, there is always someone else available to provide the goals. In this case it was Diogo Jota, who seamlessly applied himself where Firmino normally plays and came within a stud’s distance of a hat-trick.

“It is about making 30 to 35 really good games instead of getting somehow through a season and playing 50 games,” Klopp explained of his selection process. “You need more than 11 players in a squad and you need more than three strikers even though we play with three strikers.”

What marks Liverpool, Chelsea and Manchester City out from the rest of the Premier League is the quality of their understudies. Selections can be mixed and matched without fear of disruption. Klopp has a second string front three ready to come in at a moment’s notice. Eager for goals, Jota was the perfect stand-in here, Takumi Minamino had a 10-minute cameo run-out, while Divock Origi waits patiently to reprise his Champions League semi-final heroics. Frankly any of that trio would walk into most Premier League starting XIs.

And Klopp added that his attack was so fluent (Liverpool have scored 39 goals, a record for this stage of the season) because his defence was stable and sorted once more. “I knew what we were lacking,” he said of last season’s failure to defend the title. “We were lacking stability because we didn’t have centre-halves for a while and we had to find solutions. In the early stages we were shocked because we couldn’t play the football we wanted to play. All of a sudden you lose your rhythm and that is what happened to us last season.”