Ok Jurgen, what’s your next move? The sky over Liverpool is baked red with flares. Kenny’s crying. Stevie’s crying. Carra’s crying. The Shankly Gates are buckling under the weight of tributes. By Monday the players will be entering detox not training. This 30-year thing has been exhausting.
When Liverpool last won the championship in 1990 it was their seventh title in 10 years. They finished nine points clear of Aston Villa and 16 ahead of third-placed Tottenham. The players didn’t look back. They simply shook hands and left for the airport with the wife and kids. See you in July lads.
The following February manager Kenny Dalglish was gone. Liverpool led the league by three points but the intensity of managing English football’s most acquisitive club proved too much even for its favourite son. The tipping point was a four-all draw with Everton in the FA Cup. Dalglish took over after Heysel and steered the club through the Hillsborough tragedy. He was burned out.
Klopp has been at the helm since 2015. He has restored the club’s sense of itself, re-established a folk identity that had been lost. The slogan “This Means More” might have been dreamed up by the same naff marketing squad that also thought it a good idea to attempt to patent the name of a city that can be traced back to the Plantagenets, yet it captures the transformation under a coach in thrall to the history of a great institution.
Jamie Carragher thought he would never see Liverpool win the title again. In the epoch of sovereign wealth funds and ownership by oligarch Liverpool were out of leverage. Then along comes a prophet whipping up a storm, telling people to believe. Are you crazy? This is Liverpool. Come on. We can do this.
And now he has. All that transformational energy brought by Klopp has morphed into relief, a great outpouring of emotion. Yet this is both an end and a start. The world is already turning, rivals gearing up for a response to Liverpool’s emphatic season. Every day spent partying is a day lost to a seething Pep Guardiola at Manchester City, an ambitious, big-spending Chelsea, a desperate Manchester United. Every action begets a reaction.
Klopp has overseen a remarkable run of results over the past two seasons. His success this term might have come last had he not been up against one of the great creations in the history of English football.
That he has finally breached the 30-year hiatus is more remarkable for the subjugation of Guardiola’s City. That a club as relentless as City – stacked with great players, a coach that doesn’t sleep and cash to burn – can hit a wall is as much a lesson for Klopp as the burnout of Dalglish. Klopp knows this, of course, having suffered similarly at his previous club Dortmund, where, after back-to-back titles, he needed a lie down himself and eventually took a sabbatical.
Time will tell how much this epic ride has taken out of Klopp and his team. Reflecting on his own experience of trying to match Liverpool, Guardiola spoke of the difficulty of maintaining standards in the context of a Premier League that never lets up.
“Maybe we didn’t arrive with the same passion. Liverpool played every single game like it was the last chance they have. And maybe we didn’t get that moment, especially the key moments in the first part of the season,” Guardiola said.
The experience at Stamford Bridge was a case in point. City were demonstrably the better side, as Chelsea manager Frank Lampard accepted.
City conceded against the run of play and subsequently, had Raheem Sterling’s shot bounced in off the post not out, would have had the lead they deserved. Providence was not with them, the variables that can change games went the way of Chelsea.
Thus was Stamford Bridge a microcosm of City’s season, highlighted by Liverpool’s relentless, almost demonic drive to claim that 19th title.
“Liverpool were fantastic in consistency throughout the whole season. We dropped points at the beginning of the season, and Liverpool didn’t drop points,” Guardiola added.
“We’ll have to recover for next season, to be more consistent, and recover the points we missed this season. Two years ago we were 25 points ahead of Liverpool, and now they are this distance ahead. We cannot forget that we won two titles.
“This is incredible success for us, for the club; the last six, seven, eight years. So we have to take a little perspective, be humble, and say not all the time we can win. And then we must learn what we need to do to avoid this situation again.”
You have to think Guardiola must be close to the edge himself having already stepped back once from the game after his Barcelona immersion.
All of this makes the longevity of Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United more incredible by the day. Twenty-five years at the helm, 13 Premier League titles in a 20-year stretch, renewing the team through half a dozen cycles.
Ferguson was ruthless, cut great players at their peaks. Paul McGrath, Mark Hughes, Paul Ince, Andrei Kanchelskis, Jaap Stam, David Beckham all sent packing without sentiment.
When the fug of celebration has passed, this is Klopp’s great challenge. Who to retain, who to let go? Asking the same group to go again three years in a row is a shout too far even for a guru of Klopp’s intuitive range. Change is necessary. Managing it easier said than done.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3eFnWDS
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