Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Klopp mask slipped and the laugh was replaced by spite and cowardice
DO I believe Everton should have been awarded a penalty when striker Dominic Calvert-lewin went down under a challenge from Liverpool’s Dejan Lovren on Sunday?
No, I don’t.
Calvert-lewin took a step to the right to bump off the Croatian and that legitimised the fall.
So I can understand why Jurgen Klopp was frustrated.
But what he should have said in his postmatch interview was: ‘That wasn’t a penalty, we tried to play the game in an open and honest way.’
Yet instead he lost face by having a go at Sky Sports’ Patrick Davidson and telling him he “only wanted to talk to people who have a little bit of understanding about football” after the reporter had given his opinion that it was a “soft penalty”.
What Klopp didn’t realise was the pundits back in the studio, with something like 600 international caps and five Champions Leagues titles between them, had agreed with their colleague.
It was cowardice on Klopp’s part and he should not have done it. When managers vent at reporters like that they are basically taking their frustrations about an official, their players, opposition players or managers out on a convenient target.
And in this instance there was an element of the mask dropping and the side of Klopp we rarely see – behind that big laugh and smile.
He came across as spiteful and completely unprofessional, and perhaps he would have been better served explaining properly why he’d left out Philippe Coutinho and Roberto Firmino than getting caught up in a debate about the penalty. It’s bizarre that a player can score a hattrick in midweek, having played brilliantly the previous Saturday, and then find himself on the bench for the derby, as Coutinho did.
And I don’t care which manager made that call – Klopp, Pep Guardiola,
Jose Mourinho, Arsene Wenger or Mauricio Pochettino – it struck me as someone trying to reinvent the wheel. If I’d been in Coutinho’s position then my manager would have seriously upset me if he told me I was out of the clash with our local rivals.
And he’d have needed a wagon and horses to drag me away from the stadium.
Anyway, I digress, because Klopp wasn’t the only manager misbehaving at the weekend, with Mourinho having a pop at Michael Oliver after the Manchester derby.
The Portuguese was just fudging the issue completely rather than being honest and saying: ‘We lost to the better team on the day.’
You’d have had a lot more respect for that.
It isn’t just those two guilty of excusemaking because you can guarantee Sam Allardyce would have said the same as Klopp had the foul been on a Liverpool striker by an Everton defender.
All bar one of them will say, ‘That was a foul’, one week and, ‘Never’, the next.
Sean Dyche is the only one who’ll say, ‘Yep, we were awful today’, or ‘Actually, we were great’, and how refreshing that is.
The rest of them deflect from their own inadequacies and it’s like being in the playground rather than listening to a professional interview with a Premier League manager.