Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool were great fun but they weren’t a great team. Not by the very highest standards. Theirs is a story of huge potential largely unfulfilled.
he era whose death knell was surely rung by five Real Madrid goals last Tuesday night was a silver rather than a golden age. In the competitions that really mattered, Liverpool ended up with one Champions League and one Premier League title. It could have been three and three. But it wasn’t.
Liverpool lacked that ability to fully capitalise on the slightest opportunity of victory which defines the game’s immortals.
Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United were the classic example. The two Champions League final victories which were their crowning glory could easily have gone the other way. In 1999 the woodwork saved them twice when 1-0 down against Bayern Munich before two injury-time goals created the competition’s most miraculous comeback.
Nine years later they were within a penalty shoot-out kick of losing to Chelsea, who’d also hit the woodwork twice. John Terry slipped on his run-up, the ball hit the outside of the post and four shots later United were champions.
Lucky? Perhaps. But something more than good fortune is probably involved if you win two Champions League finals in that fashion.
The breaks didn’t go Liverpool’s way in their two finals against Real. In 2018 it was Sergio Ramos putting Mo Salah out of the game and Loris Karius having the nightmare to beat them all. Last year’s final came down to Salah and a ’keeper yet again, Liverpool being denied victory by Thibaut Courtois’s string of stops from the Egyptian.
Everyone agreed they had been the better team on the night. Just like Bayern had been in 1999. The observation couldn’t have been more irrelevant. Real have won four Champions Leagues during Klopp’s seven seasons at Liverpool. It’s the kind of thing really great teams do. Liverpool did it when winning four European Cups between 1977 and 1984.
It’s also what Manchester City have done in the Premier League with four of the last five titles. In an era defined by the battle between Klopp and Pep Guardiola, the winner is clear. This too might have been different. The two epic title battles of 2018-19 and 2021-22 could have gone either way. They went City’s. In the first of those campaigns they needed a wonder strike from the unlikely boot of Vincent Kompany against Leicester. In the second, three goals in six minutes against Aston Villa. They found a way and Liverpool didn’t.
Liverpool’s fantastic late runs in both seasons, nine wins on the trot in 2018-19 and 17 games unbeaten in 2021-22, might suggest they couldn’t have done any more. Yet the first title was lost not by the 2-1 defeat at the Etihad when Liverpool were leading the league in January, but by the run of four draws in six matches which followed shortly afterwards.
Having clawed their way back from an apparently impossible position last season, Liverpool ultimately lost the title because they were held 1-1 by Spurs in their second last home game. The ferocity of their competition with City left little room for error and Liverpool were the ones who blinked.
This may seem a harsh assessment. During all those seasons Klopp was at a big disadvantage in terms of resources. Only he and Liverpool stood between City and the type of unchallenged dominance Bayern enjoy in the Bundesliga.
Liverpool had the support of most neutrals in their battle against an enterprise which, even before the latest revelations, had a fraudulent air to it. Passionate where City were clinical, at their very best Klopp’s side were uniquely exhilarating. On the greatest Anfield nights, the Champions League victories over City in 2018 and Barcelona in 2019, the momentum reached an irresistible fever pitch.
That unstoppable quality was never more obvious than in the incredible 26 wins from 27 matches run at the start of the 2019-20 season. The question of whether this was the greatest ever Premier League team was being bandied about at the time. Then, suddenly, we had more serious things to think about.
The greatest irony of the Klopp era and the one which lends it a somewhat tragic cast is that when Liverpool did win the title it didn’t feel like a real triumph. The three preceding decades of famine generated an expectation that when Liverpool finally did break through we’d witness one of the most passionate celebrations in sporting history.
Everyone imagined something unforgettable, one of the Premier League’s greatest days. Instead Covid forced Liverpool to lift the trophy at an empty Anfield. The anticipated citywide carnival was replaced by a handful of individual bacchanals which drew opprobrium rather than admiration.
The crown felt cursed. Liverpool really did have no luck at all. Even that 2019 Champions League final was won against Spurs, as underwhelming an opposition as ever appeared in the decider. Last year’s final, by contrast, offered the possibility of victory against the ultimate European winners.
It would have been a glorious culmination of all Klopp’s work. Instead it became a last hurrah. Sadio Mane seemed to take the team’s soul with him when he left. The days when Liverpool were resisters-in-chief to the evil empire seem over. Mikel Arteta’s plans for his young Arsenal team have come spectacularly to fruition. Erik ten Hag is making Manchester United great again. Newcastle and Chelsea’s ability to match City financially should eventually transfer to the pitch.
Transition, with or without Klopp, lies ahead for Liverpool. When they went 2-0 up on Tuesday the magic of Anfield made it easy to imagine that logic might be defied once more and a team eighth in the Premier League, behind Fulham and Brighton, might overcome one lying second in La Liga behind Barcelona.
Real ruthlessly demolished such dreams. Jordan Henderson looks a lot older at 32 than Luka Modric does at 37. Fabinho and Alisson already seem to be thinking of future destinations. Trent Alexander-Arnold’s defensive flaws, which could be camouflaged in a team on top, are exposed in one frequently forced on to the back foot. Virgil van Dijk has not been the same since his injury in October 2020 which, last year’s rally notwithstanding, may come to seem like a turning point.
The glory days are over. These have been magnificent seasons for English football’s most passionately supported club, but the cold light of history will cast a shadow of underachievement over them. Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool were great fun but they weren’t a great team.
Broadcasters leave us with a host of warm memories
It’d be a pity if the death of Dickie Davies was overshadowed by that of John Motson.
A pity but also kind of fitting. After all, Davies’ ITV Saturday sports programme World of Sport was generally overshadowed by the mighty Grandstand on BBC1, Motson’s home station.
Yet while Motson, who passed away on Thursday aged 77, was good in the same unremarkable way as Barry Davies, David Coleman and Gerald Sinstadt, ITV’s Davies, who died this day last week at the age of 94, was unique.
There was something vaguely disreputable about World of Sport with its wrestling, horse racing, speedway, stock car racing and clips of leftfield sports. Davies, with his good-natured spiv air, tied it all together perfectly.
Before becoming a broadcaster he’d been a ship’s purser announcing the entertainment and calling bingo numbers on board. You could see that in him just as you could discern in Motson’s dogged seriousness his childhood as the son of a methodist minister.
When I think of John Motson I remember. But when I think of Dickie Davies I smile like I did on those bygone Saturday afternoons of water skiing, hang gliding and Evel Knievel.
Wembanyama is set to soar to new heights in NBA
Remember the name Victor Wembanyama. You’re going to hear it a lot. The number one prospect in this year’s NBA draft, who’s just made the cover of Sports Illustrated, is regarded as potentially the best prospect to enter the league since LeBron James arrived 20 years ago.
The seven foot four Parisian stunned everyone in October with two Las Vegas exhibition game performances in which he displayed an unprecedented equal facility in outside shooting, shot blocking and running the court.
Those present had never seen anything like it, James declared, “He’s like an alien. No-one has ever seen anyone as tall as he is but as fluid and graceful as he is out on the floor.” James’ son Lebron Jr, known as Bronny, should be one of the top picks in next year’s draft but is currently deciding between Ohio State, Oregon and USC as his college destination.
The draft stock of this season’s outstanding college player Brandon Miller may have suffered when a court heard on Tuesday that he’d supplied former teammate Darius Miles with the gun used in the murder of a young woman.
America being America, Miller, who hasn’t been charged with any offence, scored a career high 41 points for Alabama against South Carolina the following night.