A LOVE LETTER TO KLOPP OF THE KOP
Klopp: My Liverpool Romance Anthony Quinn
Faber £12.99 ★★★★ ★
It is all there in the title: Anthony Quinn is head over heels in love with Jürgen Klopp. No wonder, really. The charismatic German football manager has done something Quinn has been craving for more than half his life: he has made Liverpool FC, the institution to which the renowned film critic and novelist has a self-confessedly disproportionate emotional attachment, successful again. Properly successful: champions of England, of Europe, of the world. So grateful is Quinn for this transformation that he has written not so much a biography as a love letter. And what a delightful romantic missive it is.
The thing about us football fans is this: we like to believe that our affiliation is based on something more than emotion and circumstance. We reckon we are making a principled choice. Liverpool supporters are as prone to the condition as any, their club’s tragic history memorialised as moral superiority.
And Klopp fits such a narrative perfectly. In Quinn’s analysis he is not just a good manager, he is a good man. Not just charismatic and tactically astute but saintly. This is the spiritual leader the writer has been waiting for since he was a bony-kneed eight-year-old kicking balls around the parks of Huyton with his brother – a history so beautifully recalled in these pages.
What is intriguing as a fan of their toxic rivals Manchester United (my view of Liverpool is on a par with my opinion of Donald Trump) is that Quinn’s prose makes this ridiculously inflated proposition seem plausible. Almost. In a compelling gallop of a read, he perfectly captures the man’s endearing likeability. As Quinn cheerfully reports, this is someone who can make the entirely narcissistic process of getting himself a hair weave and cosmetic dentistry a bit of a giggle. A right laugh, actually.
At the centre of the piece is not so much the breathless reporting of Liverpool’s
Covid-delayed title triumph last season (boy, they kept quiet about that: if only somebody could have told us they had won the thing). It is the chapter called Shanklopp: An A-Z. In this, Quinn suggests that the German’s leadership so echoes that of Bill Shankly, it is almost as if the busy Scottish boss, who has become canonised in Liverpool mythology, has been reborn. According to Quinn, in so much – their connection with the fans, with the city, with the place’s history – does Klopp resemble Shankly that this is effectively the Second Coming.
His conclusion is that Liverpool aren’t properly Liverpool without such a leader. And now they have one. Which is a bit odd given that in between the two, Bob Paisley proved that you could be neither beguiling nor magnetic and still guide the club to more trophies than the two of them combined.
But then, in football, logic is not always the abiding force. Quinn loves Klopp with a passion that flies aloof of reason. And right now, as the German leads Liverpool to ever greater achievements, he is not the only one.