He made us believe again, that’s worth more than any trophy.
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They hardly actually do that, do they?
He made us dream.
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They do
Odd seeing as they get so offended when other clubs mock them
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The incels are up bright and early. No fear of the after effects of activities involving friends or goings on outside their basement.
The incels don’t understand that following a special club like Liverpool is about the journey.
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A journey that you disembark from regularly
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More joy to be had from the good times if you’ve experienced the bad times.
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Exactly pal. The win over Dortmund meant more than cruising to a league win with seven games to spare over a Petro State.
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“If we are only happy when we are winning in the end, whenever your race finishes, what life would that be?”
Coach Klopp
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Profound
The hop on -hop off bus journey for you mate.
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He disembarks the liner from time to time to peruse the town
The incels will never understand it’s the story that matters and not just the ending.
It was a hell of a ride.
Liverpool beware, this is how Jurgen Klopp’s final season at Dortmund fell apart
Similarities between his final year with the German club and his eight season with Liverpool have emerged for all to see
ByStefan Bienkowski31 October 2022 • 8:00am
The situation Jürgen Klopp’s Borussia Dortmund found themselves in during the 2014/15 season is not dissimilar to Liverpool’s current one CREDIT: Patrik Stollarz/AFP
Jürgen Klopp was utterly furious. He watched impatiently as any prospect of his team picking up a result quickly slipped through his fingers. Not for the first time that afternoon, Klopp turned to the official on the sidelines and let out a torrent of abuse. And in return, the referee walked across the pitch and banished the red-faced manager to the stands.
Klopp’s Borussia Dortmund side were on the brink of losing 2-1 to Borussia Mönchengladbach and the manager had once again lost his temper.
The touchline scenes of fire and fury came as no surprise to the home fans. The outburst in question was the fourth time Klopp had been sent off as a manager in the Bundesliga and the subsequent fine pushed the manager’s total payout to the German Football Association for bad behaviour to a staggering €58,000.
As Liverpool fans now know all too well, the financial punishment did not do much to hamper Klopp’s tendency for losing his rag on the sidelines. And his colourful and equally exasperated reaction to match officials is not where the comparisons between Klopp’s tenure at Dortmund and Liverpool start or end.
Klopp picked up a red card for haranguing an official when Liverpool faced Manchester City earlier this month CREDIT: Phil Noble/Reuters
A 1-0 defeat against Nottingham Forest was followed on Saturday by a 2-1 home loss to Leeds United, and with just four wins from 12 league games, Klopp’s eighth season at Anfield has not exactly gone to plan. After a remarkable campaign that saw the club come close to a historic quadruple, Liverpool now look like a team stuck in the middle of a troublesome rebuild and perhaps even a little out of ideas - much like the situation Dortmund found themselves in during Klopp’s seventh and final season at the Westfalenstadion.
“At one point I think a lot of Dortmund fans thought they were going to get relegated,” notes Uli Hesse, German football journalist and author of “Building the Yellow Wall: The Incredible Rise and Cult Appeal of Borussia Dortmund” as he recalls the 2014-15 campaign. “Having been in the Champions League final just a few years prior, we went into the season not necessarily expecting to win the Bundesliga but certainly expected to be there or thereabouts. Then a couple of months later we were suddenly dead last.”
Indeed, Klopp’s Dortmund side picked up just two wins from their opening 10 games and by late November the very team that had wrestled their way to a European final were sitting in bottom spot in the Bundesliga. And their problems were not entirely different from what is going wrong for Liverpool at the moment.
By 2014, the manager’s total payout to the German Football Association for bad behaviour to a staggering €58,000 CREDIT: Alex Grimm/Bongarts
The biggest issue was Klopp’s over-reliance on star players and being blindsided by a lack of depth in his squad. After building a team that took on the world on a shoe-string budget before subsequently running them into the ground for six seasons, cracks were beginning to show in Dortmund’s side. Not only was Klopp forced to start the season without stars like Mats Hummels and Jakub Blaszczykowski, but other key players like Sebastian Kehl, Marco Reus and Henrikh Mkhitaryan all picked up injuries early in the campaign.
Such was the extent of Dortmund’s absentees, Ilkay Gundogan was rushed back from a year-long back injury that had required surgery to start games by mid October when he should have been off until December.
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The Westfalenstadion side were clearly exhausted. Over the course of the season, Klopp’s side fell behind to an early goal 17 times and only turned the match around to win all three points once. “We are playing a bit out of long-term memory, but without the form we had when we could still play like that,” admitted Klopp after a 2-1 defeat by FC Köln in September. "It’s not enough that the team wants it.”
When asked to explain what was going on from the sidelines, the injured club captain Hummels said that his side simply weren’t capable of winning the “50-50” games like they used to, and that it was leading to dire consequences. “That first leads to a loss of confidence, then to insecurity, then to nervousness,” admitted the defender.
Klopp did try and add depth to his team in that final season, but it was to no use. The incoming players simply were not good enough. Nuri Sahin and Shinji Kagawa were shadows of their former selves, young defender Matthias Ginter never lived up to the potential he had shown at Freiburg while Adrian Ramos and Ciro Immobile, the two strikers signed for a combined £24 million to help compensate for the loss of Robert Lewandowski, managed just five league goals between them that season. The next generation were not as good as the last.
The departure of Robert Lewandowski for Bayern Munich left an unfillable hole in the side CREDIT: Bernd Thissen/DPA
After spending the winter break in the relegation zone, Dortmund did turn a corner and started making their way up the league table but by that point Klopp had had enough. And while the German manager denied any suggestions that he was physically and mentally exhausted in his resignation announcement, he did indirectly blame Bayern Munich’s courting of star players and his club’s inability to combat that.
“We were no longer able to react, and came under pressure,” was the conclusion of the Dortmund head coach. It had taken its toll on Klopp and by that point his relationship with the media and German football in general was diminishing quickly.
Although Klopp’s press conferences would later be remembered by Hummels as bearing the same tone and humour of “a late night show”, that final season saw the Dortmund manager get increasingly frustrated at suggestions that his tactics had been “decoded” and would instead turn to flippant remarks to explain poor results. “My memory of him is that he was just very thin-skinned,” recalls Hesse when asked to depict Dortmund press conferences in that final season. “Let me put it this way: He questioned the lines from reporters that a year earlier he would have turned into a joke.”
After a 2-0 defeat by Hoffenheim, Klopp glibly described the antics of his porous defence as “more freak show material” and when asked about his team being tired from his high-intensity tactics after another poor result, the Dortmund manager labelled the suggestion as a “wretched question” that was intended to damage the morale of his team.
The most memorable media meltdown perhaps came a few months prior to his final season at the club, when Klopp took offence to a TV presenter asking if his team were now out of the Champions League after losing the first leg of their quarter-final tie with Real Madrid 3-0.
"You can answer a stupid question stupidly,” Klopp fired back, before storming out of the TV studio, only for his attached microphone to pick up the manager shouting "What kind of question is that?” The dramatic exit left the other guest on the show, Oliver Kahn, to excuse Klopp’s behaviour as that of a man under “such high pressure”.
Klopp was a transformed character from the start of his time at Dortmund and his eventual departure CREDIT: Alex Grimm/Getty Images
“When he did eventually step down at Dortmund, a lot of people in the media that had been very enamoured by him because he’s such a natural in front of camera, were really getting exasperated by him,” noted Hesse. “For a while everyone loved him because he’s a cool guy and was a breath of fresh air at Dortmund, but over the years everyone that wasn’t a Dortmund fan was really getting a bit sick of him.”
The man that was often parodied on German sketch shows for his famous laugh and a gleaming smile had become a gloomy figure at Dortmund, struggling to hide the torment of watching his sporting project go up in smoke.
And yet, despite the tragic demise, most Dortmund fans would have stuck by Klopp even if the worst-case scenario had come to pass.
“He was and is still fantastically popular in Dortmund because he’s like a fan on the sidelines,” adds Hesse. “I think most Dortmund fans would have gladly gone into the second division with Klopp and they would have gladly said let the coach stay and just change the entire team.”
Whether or not history is destined to repeat itself with Klopp at Anfield, it’s probably a safe bet to assume that Liverpool fans share that sentiment entirely. Things may not be going well for the German manager right now, and a darker side of Klopp may be on show more often this season, but he’s in no danger of losing the support of his club or his adoring fans.
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The boys want Klopp out it seems
There’ll be some backtracks when Jürgen guides us to Istanbul (not the kebab shop in Limerick) in June. The Ratoath lads have the flights and accommodation booked. Tell Us Never.
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Backtrack from the footix liverpool fans who want him out?
Flopp Out