Confident boss has no need for Plan B
THE problem with Jurgen Klopp is he hasn’t got a Plan B. No, scratch that, it’s the problem with every manager these days. Pep Guardiola, Antonio Conte, Jose Mourinho, Arsene Wenger. It’s as if having spent a rough £200million or more assembling a squad of footballers to execute a specific style of play, they end up married to it.
Not having a Plan B is the reason almost every football match is lost, according to social media.
It used to be losing the dressing room that was to blame. If a manager was sacked, it could almost be guaranteed he had lost the dressing room.
Indeed, some clubs still cling to this retro logic. At Leicester, for instance, the dressing room is lost so frequently that it would make sense to stop buying players and invest instead in coastguards, or those dogs with the brandy that find avalanche victims in Switzerland.
Their current manager, Claude Puel, has now lost his second dressing room in as many seasons, after Southampton. He should designate a special drawer in his kitchen so he always knows where the dressing room is; you know, like keys or your passport.
But Plan B — that’s the more up-to-date problem. If Klopp (right) does not defeat Roma at Anfield tonight, it will no doubt be widely concluded that his furious high-pressing game has been found out and he needs something different. The opposite, usually.
That’s the problem with Plan Bs. Invariably, they amount to a reversal of every principle and instinct the manager has. Don’t go short, go long. Don’t go long, go short. Don’t sit back, press high. Don’t press high, sit back.
Before the Champions League quarter-final, Klopp was asked if other teams needed to be brave and aggressive, like Liverpool, against Manchester City.
He responded by imagining a scenario in which West Bromwich Albion, using their current personnel, attempted the gegenpress. ‘City would go through them like a hot knife and butter,’ he concluded.
The hurried adoption of Plan B isn’t always a good sign anyway. Drawing 0-0 at home to Montenegro in 2010, England boss Fabio Capello threw on Kevin Davies and began waving his arms furiously at his midfielders, in the universal touchline sign language for ‘stick it in the mixer, lads’. That wasn’t a bold Plan B. That was a Plan A that had failed so spectacularly the coach had run out of ideas beyond abandoning every principle he had favoured his entire career, to go direct. Dave Bassett always maintained that every team seeking a goal in the last ten minutes played like Wimbledon, so if that was the best way to score, why not start like Wimbledon instead? As a piece of logic, it is hard to fault.
Yet modern football has changed. Barcelona do not play like Wimbledon if chasing the game and neither did the supreme comeback specialists, Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United.
Managers stick to their game plan now, even those who seek to make 1,000 passes as the clock runs down. Guardiola does not have a route-one player to call upon, even if he wished. He has spent £300million on personnel geared to play one way: just as Klopp would, in Guardiola’s circumstances.
As it is, Klopp has spent Liverpool’s budget (which is still significant) on his own ideals. That does not make Liverpool predictable or simplistic because every good Plan A contains many variations. Liverpool utilise plans A (i) to A (vii) because in any given game, Klopp can switch the attack lines of Mohamed Salah, Roberto Firmino and Sadio Mane, alter the position of his full-backs, even chop between three and four at the back.
But the blueprint is stable because, most weeks, it works. Klopp thinks that, executed well, he has a winning strategy. He hasn’t got the time, or the personnel, to radically experiment. He might tweak for a dangerous opponent, mark an important playmaker: but it’s still Plan A. He might pick a centre-half better suited to thwarting Edin Dzeko, or double up on Stephan El Shaarawy tonight, but again: Plan A. The elusive Plan B is invariably wholesale reversal, anyway. And how would that work with modern, elite football as it is? Klopp’s net spend places him in the black, but constructing his current squad has so far cost £221.3m, not including outgoings. So to play differently might consume that again. Manchester City no longer have a Dzeko-like figure to lead the line. Yet the going rate for that player, and at super-elite level, is what Manchester United paid for Romelu Lukaku: £75m. Maybe a target man will then need wingers to provide a more direct route to goal. That could be another £75m, at least. And this, remember, is Plan B. Most weeks, these guys do not start, not even in domestic cups. They do not fit the manager’s philosophy. They are there for when he loses all faith in his thinking and decides Bassett has a point. And who wants a boss with such fragile confidence? If Twitter had been around 44 years ago, Total Football would have been denounced and Rinus Michels discredited as a fool sticking rigidly to Plan A, who didn’t have the wit to hook Johan Cruyff, and tell Johan Neeskens to start banging it long to a big man as a way of getting to Franz Beckenbauer and West Germany in the 1974 World Cup final. For that was the problem with Michels and his Holland team, you know. No Plan B. That’s why no one remembers them.