IF KLOPP CAN’T SEE AGE IS LIVERPOOL’S FATAL FLAW, IT’S OVER...
It was a book by Jurgen Klopp’s assistant Pep Lijnders, published last August, which made you wonder if Liverpool were perhaps getting a little too caught up in their own publicity.
the breathless publication, entitled Intensity, was the inside story of the club’s success, and it would certainly have had the old Boot Room boys — Bob Paisley, Ronnie Moran and Joe Fagan — spinning in their graves.
the whole point of that legendary, windowless room, with its upturned beer crates for seats, was that Liverpool’s coaches lured opposition managers in at 5pm on a Saturday and flattered them into offering up their secrets — while revealing none of their own.
In his book’s prologue, Lijnders posed the question: ‘How much do we want to give away?’ and proceeded to answer it. ‘Everything,’ he declared. this didn’t matter, he figured, because: ‘How do you stop unpredictability? How do you stop flexibility? How do you stop intensity?’ Well, Brentford had a few answers to all three of the above as they dismantled Liverpool on Monday night.
Lijnders gifted us a few little insights into how Klopp and his staff got the environment right.
Barbecues on the terrace and table tennis in the hallway at the club’s training ground. Klopp’s extraordinary magnetism. Klopp’s new ideas, like playing the ‘first pass forward’ every time, from last season.
But given that the entire creed was built around what Lijnders described in his book as ‘one of my quotes in big lettering on the wall’ — that quote being: ‘Our identity is intensity’ — there seemed to be an obvious question to answer. How do you maintain the athleticism of a team being asked to work like a crack commando unit, week to week?
the prospect of players reaching the wrong side of 30 just doesn’t seem to exist in Lijnders’ world when in fact that is very much the reality now, two and a half years on from that Premier League title. Klopp cannot seriously expect Mohamed Salah, James Milner, Jordan Henderson and Fabinho to play the high press which has delivered him so much success when they are all 29 or older. Or Virgil van Dijk to be their protector at 31.
It seems like heresy to challenge a manager who has delivered arguably the most sublime English football narrative of the past five or six years — restoring a club rooted in the heart of a workingclass city to the top of the game, without the help of a Gulf state’s sovereign wealth fund. But if Klopp cannot come to an acceptance that age is the flaw at the core of this team, then it’s over.
the Klopp we are currently witnessing in the public realm seems blinded to reality in the same way that his assistant evidently is. When you stripped out the memorable one-liner from his post-match press conference at Brentford — about discussions with referee Stuart Attwell being akin to ‘talking to a microwave’ — we were left with the delusional talk of a man refusing to see what was right in front of his nose.
Brentford had ‘stretched the rules’ with aerial challenges, he said. It took thomas Frank to enter the press room and calmly deconstruct that — pointing out that VAR is pretty hot on disallowing goals, and had done so twice to Brentford’s detriment in his team’s 3-1 win.
there’s been some absurd talk about Klopp and his ‘seven-year itch,’ given that his Borussia Dortmund team started failing at that precise time in his tenure there. As if to say that this man has a limited attention span. What we seem to be witnessing here is a manager so elementally attached and committed to the players who have taken Liverpool to the heights, that he can’t let them go.
We’ve been here before, of course, with another charismatic Liverpool manager who was a
messiah to those on the red half of Merseyside. It took the legendary 1-0 FA Cup quarter-final defeat by Watford, in February 1970, to force Bill Shankly into a realisation that his ageing Liverpool team were not good enough.
Alun Evans, tommy Lawrence, Ian St John and Ron Yeats were promptly ushered through the door and Shankly had delivered another First Division title before he walked away in 1974.
It was a relentless process of renewal after that. Not a year went by for the next decade without the club paying out very substantially indeed for a new arrival. Phil Neal, David Johnson, Alan Hansen, Alan Kennedy, Frank McGarvey, Ian Rush and Mark Lawrenson all marked the changing of the seasons. the world has turned in so many ways, but why should that principle not still apply?
Lijnders’ words strike a note of hubris and have certainly not aged well. ‘Dominate midfield and you will dominate the game,’ he declares in the book — when Monday night again revealed the centre to be the problem area for the once relentless Reds.
‘the Liverpool of today isn’t the Liverpool of tomorrow or yesterday,’ is another of his pearls. It certainly shouldn’t be and if Klopp can’t face up to that fact, his team will become irrelevant to any talk about titles.