Klopp’s no longer seeing red over row as Everton appoint Big Sam

JURGEN Klopp said any bad blood with Sam Allardyce was in the past as he welcomed the appointment of the new Everton manager.

Klopp and Allardyce clashed verbally when the latter was manager of Sunderland two seasons ago.

Allardyce branded Klopp (right) a “soft German” after the Liverpool boss was so incensed by a tackle from Jeremain Lens on Mamadou Sakho that police stepped in to calm the tension between the two benches.

Allardyce then apologised after claiming Liverpool’s injury problems were down to Klopp’s style of play.

The pair do not have long to wait for their next encounter, with the first Merseyside derby of the season taking place at Anfield on December 10.

Klopp said: “With Sam I have kind of a history, when he was at Sunderland and he said something after the game.

“Then he was the manager of the England national team and we had a very good relationship.

“I’m happy for him, it’s good for us when Everton is in a good moment.”

RUSSIAN president Vladimir Putin promised “a major sporting festival of friendship and fair play”, his Fifa equivalent Gianni Infantino assured the audience it would be “the best World Cup ever” and an endearingly energised Gareth Southgate said “it really takes you back to the pureness of football, a kid filling in the games,andthatgenuineexcitement of being involved”… only for the first game to be filled in to be the hosts against Saudi Arabia.

That is a fixture between the two worst ranked teams in Russia 2018, and might well be the most underwhelming opening match of all time, but that just sets the tone and fits for what might be the most underwhelming group-stage draw of all time.

Itwasafeelingthatwas impossible to escape after a predictably glitzy ceremony with Putin (below with Diego Maradona and Pele )presentin the Kremlin State Palace that means this World Cup will miss twostaplesofWorldCupspast: a proper group of death and the kind of properly consequential heavyweight fixtures that really energise such groups and tournaments.

That is probably a result of the new seeding system and undeniably creates a soft start to the competition — especially for those big sides — something that is all the more underwhelming because the group stage is often the true essence ofaWorldCup;whenthe games come thick and fast and there is such a joy to jumping around different teams as the many different storylines of a tournament start to take shape. If they don’t feel like they have the same consequence, it won’t feel the same.

One big consequence of that, however, is that it could lead to something that has largely escaped discussion of the groupstage draw and what the World Cup as a whole has missed over the past few decades: a properly crackling knock-out stage, with genuinely massive heavyweight-against-heavyweight fixtures.

The groups mean one of the likelier quarter-final line-ups as it stands could be: France v Portugal, Brazil v England, SpainvArgentinaandGermany v Belgium.

There have admittedly been similar sentiments expressed about previous tournaments, and Southgate has spent a lot of the week talking about the tendency to underestimate mid-ranking teams, an issue thatisallthemorerelevantin an era where there have been more “surprise” semi-finalists than ever before.

It’s just those sentiments have been expressed when there was more concentration of quality in groups.

The only matches that really stand out as properly big games in this group stage are Portugal-Spain and Belgium-England, although there is the danger that the latter could be a dead rubber because it is the last game of a fairly lukewarm group.

Really, neither England nor Belgium should have any problems qualifying.

That can’t quite be said for Argentina, and their Group D (Iceland, Croatia, Nigeria) is probably theclosestthingtoagroupof death because of its relative