TIME TO WRITE A NEW CHAPTER
Liverpool’s glorious history won’t help us tonight, warns Klopp
JURGEN Klopp understands his football club but he understands his sport more.
The Liverpool manager arrived in Rome yesterday following a path travelled many years ago by some of those who came before him. Without the two European Cups lifted here in 1977 and 1984, Liverpool would not be what Liverpool are.
Through the fallow domestic years, European glory has sustained them. But Klopp is a man who will manage Liverpool his own way. Nostalgia is not his thing.
‘To be honest I am not that kind of guy,’ he said last night.
If his team are to close out a deal opened on that raucous night at Anfield eight days ago then they will do it alone. Ghosts of glories past will not help them.
This does not play to the headlines and it does nothing to indulge the thousands of red romantics who arrived here yesterday fuelled not only by expectation and beer but also by memories of Terry McDermott, Kevin Keegan, Tommy Smith, Alan Kennedy and Bruce Grobbelaar.
Klopp, though, is here not to add to those stories. Instead he would rather start to write his own.
‘From the first minute you come into the club you are confronted straight away by the history,’ he said. ‘The story of Liverpool in Rome is great but nobody here thinks it helps a lot that our grandfathers won here.
‘It’s just a game in a wonderful stadium in a wonderful city against a very strong side.
‘Creating history doesn’t happen because you say so beforehand. We don’t need to make this game bigger than it is. It is already big enough. We only have to do what our boys are best at, playing football, and then we will see what the score is.’
Carrying a 5-2 lead into tonight’s game, Liverpool’s task on the field is straightforward enough. It is to avoid calamity. If they do, they will contest their eighth European Cup final in Kiev at the end of the month.
The first part of the job at hand has been to avoid the noise and that is not always easy. Klopp — like all Liverpool managers — is constantly confronted by history. This week, he and his players have the attendant unease about security to deal with as well.
Klopp was asked about the horrific attack on Liverpool fan Sean Cox before last week’s game once again yesterday. Georginio Wijnaldum, the Liverpool midfielder, was asked about it three times as he fulfilled prematch media duties. Both Liverpool and Roma — who trained in shirts carrying Cox’s name yesterday — have handled that dreadful business as well as could be expected.
And so to the field. Liverpool begin heavy favourites to progress and rightly so. If they score, they will surely go through. And Klopp’s Liverpool almost always score. Danger lies only in complacency and perhaps misfortune.
Much has been made of the way Roma beat Barcelona 3-0 here in the second leg of their quarter- final. Do that again tonight and they go through.
But if Liverpool need lessons they are not necessarily found in
the tape of that game but in their own quarter-final, second leg at Manchester City last month. Liverpool won that game 2-1 but after having conceded a goal in the second minute they were drowning for a while. City hit the post at 1-0 and then had a good goal wrongly disallowed. Chasing a miracle, City could easily have been two-thirds of the way towards overturning the 3-0 deficit by halftime. ‘I know what you mean but we didn’t need that game to learn that,’ said Klopp. ‘That is the nature of the game. It can turn in any minutes. It’s all about us being active and doing what we are good at. If you really want to win you have to accept beforehand that you may lose.
‘We have to be really brave and not wait until we really need to be brave. Roma have to win and take risks and when that happens we have to take advantage.’
From those few sentences, it was possible to detect a message, a recognition that Liverpool didn’t quite get things right at City.
One of the beauties of Klopp’s team is their ability to set an early tempo but at the Etihad they didn’t manage it. Liverpool, perhaps unsure of how to approach the game, were passive and at one stage looked as though they might pay a price.
Tonight they face a team who are not in City’s class. Nevertheless, it is imperative that they start the game as though they need to win it. Asked about Barcelona’s failure to convert a 4-1 lead into progress last month, Klopp struck a similar tone.
‘Rome were more ready than Barcelona that night,’ he said. ‘ Barcelona thought probably that the game was decided already.
‘Everybody is telling us that this will be difficult. Nobody asked Barcelona that because nobody thought it could happen.
‘So if a warning is needed — and I don’t think it is — then there it is. We need to be ready because Roma will be ready.’
Liverpool have twice lost by big margins this season, once at City (5-0) in September and once at Tottenham (4-1) in October. But they are a better team defensively now, even if frailties occasionally show themselves.
Their central defenders Virgil van Dijk and Dejan Lovren will need to have big nights, as will their goalkeeper Loris Karius. All three are in virgin territory.
Still, it is hard to look past Liverpool’s remarkable forward Mo Salah as the game’s decisive figure. Liverpool came here with match-winners in their ranks in ’77 and again in ’84. This time is no different. We will see them in Kiev, for sure.