JUERGEN KLOPP is an excellent football manager. He is also charming, thoughtful, funny, outspoken and shrewd. No wonder Liverpool fans – and the English media – were virtually frothing at the mouth when he chose to end his post-Borussia Dortmund sabbatical and take over at Anfield. It was a real coup for this club of perennial underachievers to land a coach of such stature. Klopp, a two-time Bundesliga winner and Champions League finalist, many felt, was going to take Liverpool back to the top of English and European football. And he may yet do so.
But he is not a miracle worker. When Klopp said in his introductory press conference that he was “The Normal One” it was not meant as some pithy catchphrase, but to highlight the fact that he has to work within the same constraints as everyone else. There would be no overnight revolution. Klopp, working overseas and in a new language for the first time, would need time to properly assess his squad, look at their strengths and weaknesses and then decide what needed changed. And, only then, could he start to implement a few ideas of his own. With the season well underway, there has been little time for Klopp to get his bearings but this was no quick-fix job. Presumably when the Liverpool board went to Germany and asked Klopp to move to Liverpool – thus giving up a more than decent chance he could have one day succeeded Pep Guardiola at Bayern Munich – they did so with a long-term project in mind. Patience and tolerance is what Klopp needs most right now.
Goodness knows, then, what he makes of the panic buttons being pushed all over Merseyside after opening his tenure with three successive draws, one of which was in Europe, the other two against teams above them in the league in Spurs and Southampton. It was hardly the worst start in the world. And yet Jamie Carragher, the one-time Pool defender, wasn’t slow in sticking the boot in, saying Liverpool had played “like a church choir” against Southampton, had been “boring”, played with “no aggression” and hadn’t created enough. Carragher’s job with Sky is to pass instant comment on stories like this but you would have thought he would have at least acknowledged that Klopp was only just in the door and still trying to get his bearings. In his first two seasons at Dortmund the club finished sixth and then fifth in the Bundesliga before winning the title over the next two years. It may take a similar period of time to restore Liverpool, not mere weeks as some seem to think should suffice.
Klopp seems somewhat bemused by the reaction to his introduction to life in English football. “I hope I'm not the only person in the stadium who thought 'this is not the end of the world',” he said of Southampton’s equaliser last weekend. “We have to calm down,” inadvertently doing a more than passable impersonation of a Harry Enfield sketch. Hopefully some take heed and give him the time he needs to properly rebuild this crumbling empire.
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