Kloppo and Poch: justice and righteousness prevail
JURGEN Klopp and Mauricio Pochettino have taken their teams to the Champions League final and, unlike their counterparts in the corporate or political arenas, they can truthfully say that it could not have been done without them.
Amid the avalanche of emotions which accompanied the victories of Liverpool and Tottenham, there was no need for some PR consultant or some Special Advisor to draft a press release making false claims of executive prowess. Giving credit where credit is not due.
Anyone could see it, anyone could tell that these men had made the difference, had shown that there is actually a difference between brilliance and bullshit, and that sometimes it is rewarded.
Justice, this was the thing at the centre of the Liverpool eruption, this sense that a fabulous season would somehow see them going out in the semi-final of the Champions League, and losing “on the nod” to Manchester City when the Premier League finishes this afternoon.
Justice, how we thirsted for it, though we knew that
one of the most tantalising attractions of sport, in some weird counter-intuitive way, is that sometimes justice is not done.
Which does not stop you thirsting for it, even when it seems so far away, as it did when City won again last Monday night, with Messi on his way last Tuesday to finish the job.
You need incalculable levels of leadership to turn that ship around, you need the qualities which Kloppo has been bringing to Liverpool since 2015 when he was rightly welcomed in these pages for his deep intelligence, his ferocious passion, and that mysterious ability to make things better than they might otherwise be — to make people better, than they might otherwise be, and to identify the right people in the first place. To lead them to a better place than any of them might have imagined.
Yes, there is a terrible yearning for leadership at this time, so terrible that it is preyed upon by some of the worst people in the world, twisted into the most inglorious of causes.
Righteousness, this was the thing at the centre of the Tottenham extravaganza. In getting this team to the final of the Champions League, Mauricio Pochettino was driven by the righteousness of the man who is trying to achieve something that others are trying to do with far more money. As he fell to his knees after beating Ajax, knowing that his team had qualified with a hat-trick scored by the last player that he had signed, about 18 months ago, he seemed to be weeping in defiance of the gods and in wonder at the improbability of it all.
And he would have understood the grief of Ajax too, who themselves had been righteous, who had come so far with even less money than he, only to find themselves in that place where sport sometimes takes you, that place where we seek justice and indeed righteousness, but all in vain.
Yet Tottenham had also beaten Manchester City, and the reprehensible monarchy which sustains them, so nothing could take away from the moral energy which Pochettino has been bringing to the party, from his inspiration of these men — like Kloppo, it seems that they will do anything for him, for as long as it takes.
And with two English teams in the Champions League final, and another two in the Europa League final, we were seeing the illumination of a broader theme, one that was so obvious you felt that even Theresa May was bound to get it. Indeed, it was so obvious even Jeremy Corbyn was bound to get it — that with Liverpool and Tottenham featuring players from England but also from many other lands, here was an absolutely perfect illustration of the power of the Premier League, with its multi-racial culture. A culture that is now of course in grave jeopardy, due to Brexit.
Well, they found their analogies all right, or their Special Advisors found them on their behalf, but somehow they avoided that completely obvious one, with May going instead for a garbled line about Britain on the brink of defeat making a comeback against European opposition — a riposte to Corbyn’s equally poor line about whether she had learned anything from Klopp on how to get a result in Europe.
Thus the two Brexiteers managed to shoehorn these marvellous events into their own disingenuous little efforts, they somehow managed to take the good out of it, because they don’t seem to have any idea of what is good, and what is bad.
There they stood in the Commons, exchanging their banalities, deliberately missing the point. As the world went mad with joy, lost in delirium at the breath-taking feats of two great English football institutions and their outstanding managers, these two sad little people, May and Corbyn, just kept doing what they do.
It is all they know, and it is one of the disasters of the age that such people are drawn to politics — at times it seems that only such people are drawn to it.
Meanwhile, at Liverpool and at Tottenham, under the leadership of serious people, they really are taking back control.