Back in the increasingly distant fall, when Liverpool's season was giddy with possibility and Jurgen Klopp was joyously sprinting down the touchline or endangering the safety of his designer spectacles by leaping into celebratory scrums with his players, there was no need for him to invoke the German expression "entscheidende phase".
Fast forward four months and every game for Liverpool is "crunch time", starting on Saturday when second-place (shudder) Tottenham surge into Anfield with Klopp's vision of taking the fallen giants of the Kenny Dalglish era back to the summit of domestic and European football hanging by a thread of his trademark track suit.