 |
| Coach Klopp Jurgen |
In April
2010, Liverpool’s then chairman Martin Broughton offered what were reported as
“detailed reassurances" to the Premier League. The reassurances did not
concern the club’s disciplinary record or some other everyday football matter.
The detailed reassurances the Premier League sought concerned the club’s
future. The Premier League wanted guarantees that the club could fulfil their
fixture list for the following season.
Six months later, Liverpool were fulfilling those fixtures in body
only. As they prepared to meet Northampton Town in the League Cup, their then
manager Roy Hodgson spoke about the “formidable challenge” League Two
Northampton would provide. Hodgson’s self-fulfilling fatalism was, as so often,
correct and Liverpool were knocked out on penalties.
 |
| FC Liverpool Chairan |
A year earlier many believed - as maybe only Liverpool’s
supporters can believe - that dominance and glory was about to return. This, it
seemed, was a golden age. Great European nights had become an integral part of
the season and the team, along with its supporters, created such an atmosphere,
it was hard not to believe in their permanence.
Liverpool had finished second after a stirring title challenge and
then, weighed down by bad owners and with a manager unable to contain his own
obsessions, it all fell apart. Nothing is permanent and history provides no
guarantees, no matter how much of it you possess.
This was the club bought by New England Sports Ventures (NESV)
that autumn, a club that feared for its existence, a club which seemed to have
been kidded by that history into believing that challenging for titles in
England or in Europe was guaranteed but which now had to assure the Premier
League that it would fulfil its basic obligations the following season.
Liverpool had been sold to men who gambled on cheap debt and when the world
turned, Liverpool was just another institution wondering if it was too big to
fail.
As Jurgen
Klopp sat in the press conference at the Etihad after Liverpool had knocked
Manchester City out of the Champions League last month, he was asked about a
statement the questioner attributed to him when he was unveiled as manager at
Anfield in October, 2015.
Klopp, it was said, had stated on that day that it would take
three years for him to make Liverpool competitive. Did he now feel they were on
a par with Bayern, Real Madrid and Barcelona?
“I’m pretty sure I didn’t say how long I’d need,” Klopp replied,
explaining that what he had said was that if he was still Liverpool manager in
four years, Liverpool would probably have won something. “It’s already
two-and-a-half years and I’ve won nothing, so time is running,” he added dryly.
On May 26th, Liverpool will be able to test if they can compete
with Real Madrid on a one-off occasion. Their run to the final has been
unexpected, but a manager who spoke on his arrival about turning doubters into
believers will not have been surprised by the development.
Jurgen Klopp’s management style has been based on many things, but
he has, as the German football writer Uli Hesse put it in 2016, always insisted
on a core belief. “Whenever I talked to him, he always brought it back to one
thing,” Hesse said. “There are very effective ways of bringing a superior
football team down to your level.”
Liverpool’s style under Klopp would appear to be effective at
doing that, but even after knocking Manchester City out, he might dispute that
this is the way for inferior teams to beat their superiors.
 |
| Coach Jurgen Klopp |
When
Liverpool have the ball, they retain that lethal intent. Those in football who
have dismissed Klopp as simply a motivator - and there are a few - have always
been guilty of one oversight, namely what Klopp is motivating his players to
do.
The
high intensity, deeply structured plan he has for his sides is elaborate and
sophisticated. It may work best if someone of Klopp’s charisma is driving the
players to implement the plan, but he has never been a manager who is simply
putting his arms around a player and telling them to fucking run about.
It may
be the idea that Zeljko Buvac represents the cerebral element of the management
team comes from the same place, although nobody could listen to Klopp for any
period of time and believe they weren’t listening to somebody with a
well-developed design for life.
Buvac’s
departure will not have helped Liverpool, but a club which was told that the
sale of Philippe Coutinho was a surrender might feel that they can overcome his
loss.
If
Liverpool win the Champions League in Kiev, Klopp would not have to worry about
time running out within four years, but he may have to manage expectation, even
if he is a manager who embraces the idea, who never feels burdened by the
history of the club.
One of
his jobs has been to persuade the players that “they can reach the expectations
of the people” and to persuade the supporters that there is no need for
fatalism, which has always been the flip side of the optimism that next year
will be the club’s year.
Liverpool
managers, famously, are altered fundamentally by the job. As Jamie Carragher
put it when discussing Gerard Houllier and Rafa Benitez , “the fella who walked
in the door was not the same fella who walked out”.
All
management jobs are capable of doing this, but Liverpool with its demands that
the manager conform to some impossible Shanksonic ideal make it even more
pressurised, although even that idea may form part of the terminal uniqueness
which plagues the club.
But
there is something in the mythology that adds to the burden, even the mythology
in its worst ‘How am I doing, boss?’ form.
In
Istanbul in 2005, a man stood in a queue for hamburgers allowing people to
touch his scarf as if it were Padre Pio’s glove.
The
scarf had, he insisted, been given to him in Rome in 1977 by Bill Shankly when
he asked Shankly for an autograph. Shankly, he claimed, didn’t have a pen so
gave him a scarf instead and here he was nearly 30 years later parading the
relic on a night that would surpass most in the club’s history, even as it
nodded to it when Jerzy Dudek imitated Bruce Grobellaar’s knee wobble on the
instruction of Jamie Carragher. The past isn’t even past.
The
day after Istanbul, the club shop at Anfield was closed because all employees
had been taken to see the game by the club. This was an example of the close
and intimate feel of Liverpool, something that was stated smugly by some as the
Liverpool Way - and mocked by some as the Liverpool Way. It was also an example
of why Liverpool had failed to move on commercially.
David
Moores sold the club in 2007 because he felt it was time to make that leap.
Roman Abramovich’s arrival had altered everything, even if the club had been
falling behind for years.
Hicks
and Gillett had big plans, but they were plans which depended on the easy
credit that fuelled the boom continuing. When the easy credit stopped,
Liverpool was left with one plan: survival.
That
era was not part of the governing myth but it was a reminder of how quickly
things can change.
And there
have been times when Liverpool would be crazy to try and escape the past. At
its best the mythology around the club creates a night like the quarter final
against Manchester City at Anfield.
This is not to make the case for Liverpool’s uniqueness as a club,
but the mythology and self-mythology serves a purpose which may have been lost
on those who take a more sardonic view.
 |
| Jurgen Klopp |
Arsenal, for example, have been a more successful club than
Liverpool in recent times. Until last season, they had qualified consistently
for the Champions League for 20 years and reached the knockout stages as well.
They have also won the FA Cup in three of the last four seasons, but none of
that has brought them sustained happiness. They have always done what is
expected. Liverpool thrive on doing the unexpected. Sometimes they have had no
choice.
If Klopp has embraced that aspect of the club, it is mainly
through a style of play where Liverpool are capable of anything.
After a defeat at home to Crystal Palace in his first few months
at Anfield, Klopp remarked that he felt ‘alone’ as the supporters left the
stadium following Scott Dann’s goal for Palace in the 82nd minute.
“After the goal on 82 minutes, with 12 minutes to go, I saw many
people leaving the stadium. I felt pretty alone at this moment. We decide when
it is over. Between 82 and 94 minutes, you can make eight goals if you like.”
When Klopp highlighted the lack of belief, it appeared he was
exaggerating for effect, but Liverpool today do look capable of scoring - or
conceding - eight goals in twelve minutes.
“We never do
it the easy way, ” Jordan Henderson said in Rome and, if that is what makes
Klopp’s side so thrilling, it is also what connects him to the fretful past of
the club.
But Klopp has moved Liverpool
into the future. On his first day at Anfield, he insisted that people in
England had “to stop thinking about money”. For a club that felt it had been
left behind and that worried about the consequences of being left behind, this
was a revolutionary idea.
Money will always make the
difference in the Premier League, so it may only get the club so far, but
Klopp’s intent from the outset has been to rewire the thinking of the club and
of the players. Eight goals can be scored in 12 minutes, money isn’t
everything, anything can happen.
Within that sense of anarchy,
there is great order. If Liverpool’s title challenge in 2014 took everyone by
surprise, Klopp has imposed a system, even if the system sometimes mimics
chaos.
 |
| Liverpool Fans |
Luis Suarez was the driving force
four years ago and once he left, Liverpool could not reboot. Coutinho was never
Suarez, but his sale illustrates how much has changed, how the club is now
prepared for the events that once could seem calamitous.
While it was never Tom Hicks and
George Gillett at war with Benitez, once FSG had decided they wanted to go with
a younger manager like Brendan Rodgers, the time was marked by disputes over
the transfer committee and who was signing which player, whether it was Rodgers
or the committee or, maybe even occasionally, both.
It was tame compared to what had
happened five years earlier but it was a reminder of how the club can easily go
in so many different directions.
In that, there will a message for
Klopp of the challenges that are to come next season.
For Klopp, it is not a burden. No
matter what happens in Kiev, the expectation will rise around Liverpool next
season. Yet they might not even be in the Champions League, which would
represent a setback, but nobody can deny the progress.
A few months before Martin
Broughton gave assurances to the Premier League, one Liverpool supporter called
Stephen Horner emailed Tom Hicks’s son, Tom Jr, attaching a link to an article
that laid out the desperate state of Liverpool’s condition.
He received a one-word reply,
‘Idiot.’ When he queried this, Junior elaborated.
“Blow me, fuck face. Go to hell,
I’m sick of you.”
After apologising to Horner,
Hicks junior resigned from the board a couple of days later. Liverpool was as
fractured as it could be.
By the end of 2010, Liverpool had
been sold to NESV (who would become FSG) despite the objections of Hicks and
Gillett. Broughton, who had been appointed to oversee the sale, was able to
express some satisfaction.
“Every Liverpool fan knows that
the most nerve-racking way to win a football match is in a penalty
shoot-out," he said. "But as long as you get the right result, it's
worth the wait.”
Waiting is now part of the
Liverpool mythology, but Klopp’s gift is that he seems unburdened by the past
while energised by all history can bring.
It may be that the club will get
to him too, that he will be worn down and fundamentally altered by the demands,
especially the demand that will now grow for a Premier League title.
But for now, he is too much of
the future to be weighed down by the past. He has created a team which is
exhilarating and relentless, a side which seems to cater for every modern whim,
including diminished attention spans, by insisting that anything can happen,
that no lead is secure, no task too daunting - and never take your eyes off it
for a minute.
For too long, anxiety and
expectation have been the agonising pincer jaws which Liverpool had to
negotiate. While it could produce tremendous excitement, they could never lose
that feeling of enormous foreboding, the sense that it all could go wrong at
any moment. Perhaps because it all could go wrong at any moment.
Klopp has been determined to
change that. “If you get up in the morning and the first hour is bad,
does that mean you go back to bed? No, it means let’s try another one,” he
asked at the end of last season when he reflected on the moments of doubt.
He has nurtured one other
revolutionary concept: unity. The issues of the transfer committee was dealt
with at the first press conference and now the club projects a united front,
even if, as Buvac’s departure would suggest, that may not always be the case.
But even that blow will not alter that purpose.
Over the past ten years, even
when success was at hand, Liverpool seemed determined to split over an
issue- and usually it wasn’t very hard to find one.
But the club has changed through
the intelligence and personality of Jurgen Klopp. There is a unity of purpose
now, a cohesion that was lacking when the club was on the brink. In those eight
years, so much has changed and when Liverpool fulfil their final fixture of the
season in Kiev, nobody will doubt which side will be turning up.
How Jürgen Klopp brought the joy back to Liverpool
Reviewed by Mr. Poster
on
8:08:00 am
Rating:
Reviewed by Mr. Poster
on
8:08:00 am
Rating:
No comments:
thanks for your comment. We'll notify you when someone reacts to your comment.