He took hold of their heart and soul but here we find a great man of Anfield staring vacantly into a TV camera... EXHAUSTED and a little BROKEN

LOOK AT A PICTURE WHEN I ARRIVED AND THEN ONE OF TODAY. THEN THINK: ‘ONLY NINE YEARS!’

AFTER Liverpool beat Newcastle United in the 1974 FA Cup final at Wembley, manager Bill Shankly left his players to celebrate and headed back to the dressing rooms.

He was, he later explained, just ‘tired from all the years’. Shankly, 60, drank a cup of tea and considered his life and what it might feel like without football. Within weeks, he was gone.

In football, not everybody gets to go out on their own terms. Not everyone manages to stay ahead of the train before it catches up and knocks them flat.

Shankly did it in 1974. Then Kenny Dalglish did it in 1991. He was exhausted, too, by the strains of the football and the weight of all he had seen during the Hillsborough disaster.

And now, all these years later, we find another great man of Anfield sitting on a chair in the middle of an empty room, with the vastness of a training ground he helped to design behind him, staring a little vacantly into a TV camera and telling the football world that he, too, no longer wishes to go on. For Jurgen Klopp, the signals first flashed across his mind not in the emptiness of a deserted dressing room or amid the emotional chaos of a 4-4 FA Cup draw at Everton, as it did for Dalglish on a February night more than three decades ago.

Rather it was during a meeting last summer to discuss the season ahead and, indeed, what lay beyond. There, in that airy, sunny meeting room, Klopp began to realise the long transformation of a football club had finally taken a bite out of a well of energy that he previously felt had no bottom.

So now Liverpool have lost Klopp, too. Once again — even after almost nine years — it feels premature. Liverpool will this summer say farewell to a man who took hold of their heart and soul, moulded it into a shape of which he approved and handed it back.

Klopp gave Liverpool supporters back their self-respect, their pride and, with it, their power. After all those years of Manchester United success, Arsenal sophistication and Chelsea largesse, Klopp was the coach who Liverpool needed back in 2015.

Bullish, confident, unique and clever. Liverpudlians fell for him immediately and by the time he was lifting trophies and taking them to Champions League finals, they would have held on to Klopp’s coat-tails even if had he decided to wade into the Mersey. They would have backed him to walk right across its surface anyway.

Great Liverpool teams used to win titles on the back of 24, 25 or 26 league victories in what was then a 42-game season. In winning the title in 2020, Klopp’s Liverpool won 32 of their 38 games. In losing out by a point to City the season before, they won 30. If this doesn’t convince you, then speak to those who had to play against them.

‘Playing a Klopp team is like being in a washing machine on a repeat cycle,’ a current Premier League manager told Mail Sport yesterday. ‘It doesn’t stop. On and on, over and over. He’s a ferocious winner. In some ways he’s almost childlike. He wants to win and will do everything and anything to make sure he does.’

The Premier League’s claim to be the best in the world has always sounded vainglorious, conceited and unattractive. Other leagues are available, after all. But Klopp, along with his great rival in Manchester, made it ring true.

It is a shame the rivalry between City and Liverpool has grown so toxic over recent years because on the field the football has been relentlessly beautiful. And one of the reasons yesterday’s announcement arrived as such a shock was that Klopp appeared to be on the way to building another great Liverpool team.

Indeed, as he sat in front of an in-house media team to officially drop his bombshell yesterday morning, he nodded to that, saying he will bequeath a team to his successor that is on point in terms of ability, balance and profile, but also age.

If it saddens him to leave it behind, then that sadness is visible today. In jeans and a brown crew-neck jumper, Klopp began what was billed initially as a ‘message to Liverpool supporters’ with a sigh, a deep breath and then a pause before it morphed into a two-minute resignation address.

In short, Klopp looked a little broken. Not by the job or the season, but by the enormity of the decision. He spoke eloquently yesterday. His turn of phrase has always been adroit. ‘We are not young rabbits any more,’ he said at his subsequent press conference at Liverpool’s training ground. ‘I cannot do this on three wheels,’ he added later.

The truth is that Klopp looked vulnerable, weary and alone. That was Klopp unmasked, at least to a degree. He assured everybody his health was good. ‘Just a few bits and bobs,’ he said. But, for once, he looked his 56 years and footage of his unveiling at Anfield back in the autumn of 2015 told its own story of what life on football’s hamster wheel has done.

‘Look at a picture when I arrived and then one of today,’ said Klopp. ‘Then think: “Nine years only?”.’ It was, as always, very well put. At Anfield over these last few weeks, as Liverpool’s season has accelerated into something approaching best form, there has been no inkling of what was to come. Klopp communicated his decision to the club hierarchy in November but his players were unaware until this week.

It is impossible to overstate the size of the hole he will leave behind, particularly at a time when other

departments at Anfield are in a state of flux.

Within weeks of arriving at the club, Klopp gathered 80 staff in the dining room at Liverpool’s old training ground for a get-to-knowyou address. He already knew every one of their names.

He used to take his Mainz and Dortmund players to pre-season survival camps. Prior to Liverpool’s title year, a pre-season visit to Evian included a session with a world champion surfer, who showed his players how to stay relaxed, calm and — crucially — alive while submerged for minutes at a time in water.

Cod psychology or cute man management? It depends on whether it works or not and for Klopp, it tended to.

Among his fellow Premier League managers, Klopp has been far from the most popular. His habit of standing on the halfway line staring at the opposition warm-up has irritated more than one beyond measure. There is little of the collegiate about the German when it comes to dealing with those in the English game not connected to his own club.

‘I remember the Zoom meetings we used to have during the Covid lockdown,’ another Premier League manager told Mail Sport. ‘All the managers would be on them. Some were not engaged, not bothered. Jose Mourinho would be there with his feet up on the desk, hardly looking, never mind listening.

‘But Jurgen was always there, always talking, leaning in towards the camera. Leading the conversation, making sure he got exactly what he wanted out of it. It annoyed me a bit.’

Where Liverpool go now, it is hard to tell and will be fascinating to learn. At other Premier League clubs — particularly in Manchester and London — there will have been a sharp intake of breath yesterday morning. City are preparing for their own succession in the mid-term. Guardiola will not stay for ever. At Manchester United, meanwhile, they have been waiting for this day for a while.

SPEAKING shortly after the appointment of Erik ten Hag in the summer of 2022, a leading United executive told me: ‘Every time we have had an upper part of the cycle, we have found someone ahead of us. But when do Pep and Klopp go? Because that’s incredibly important. Because then it might change.’

And now we are here, at least in part. The first night of Klopp’s time as a resident of Merseyside was spent in the city’s Hope Street Hotel. It seemed appropriate then and it feels that way now. Former Liverpool chief executive Ian Ayre was convinced by Klopp within 20 minutes of their first meeting. ‘You just knew he would be brilliant,’ Ayre told Mail Sport.

Did anyone know he would be quite like this, though? Did anyone know this son of a travelling salesman would illuminate Anfield so strikingly and for so long?

Liverpool won their one title under Klopp in the Covid season. There were no crowds to see the line finally drawn under that desperate 30-year drought. So a valedictory second would be appropriate this time round.

Whether the timing of this announcement will affect the chances of that is a debating point Klopp himself took no issue with yesterday. When Alex Ferguson announced the 2001-02 season would be his last at Old Trafford, he immediately regretted it. ‘I think a lot of them put their tools away,’ he later said of his players.

That retirement ultimately did not take place for another 11 years. Ferguson eventually stayed at United for a total of 27, but that kind of longevity is not for everyone. Indeed, it is alien to most.

Dalglish — who will feel and relate to Klopp’s departure as keenly as anybody — realised he was cooked a year before he eventually stepped away. He hung on out of a sense of duty. When he did leave, he did so broken, ashen and beaten. The horrors of Hillsborough were following him to bed every night.

Klopp has decided not to wait until he cannot continue. He’s ahead of the tidal wave and we should all be glad of that. ‘Better to leave too early than too late,’ was the way he put it yesterday.

Life has changed so much since Dalglish, who returned for a second spell in 2011, stepped away. Even more so since Shankly did so. Some things remain the same, however.

Told by a TV reporter back in 1974 that Shankly was retiring, a young Liverpool fan was asked what the news meant to him. ‘Everything,’ he said.