Jamie Carragher book extract, part one: Inside the football mind of Jurgen Klopp
Liverpool’s restoration to the pinnacle of English and European football under Jürgen Klopp began on the aptly named Hope Street.
Directly opposite the city’s prestigious Philharmonic Hall and within a well-directed set-play of the Everyman Theatre ‒ the breeding ground for many of Merseyside’s finest playwrights, poets and artists ‒ lie the plush rooms and suites providing Klopp and his players with an HQ before Anfield fixtures.
The Hope Street Hotel is where Klopp signed the contract to become Liverpool’s manager in 2015, and it offered him the stage from which in 2019 he delivered his most inspirational vocal performance yet. Only twice in European Cup history – Greece’s Panathinaikos in 1971 and Barcelona in 1986 – had a team come from three or more goals down after the first leg of a semi-final to progress to the final. On the afternoon of the second leg of the Champions League semi-final against Barcelona, Klopp’s impassioned speech in the pre-match team meeting convinced his players they could become the third side to do so, defy expectations and overturn their 3-0 deficit against Spain’s newly crowned champions.
“Because it is you, it is not impossible,” Klopp assured his squad.
Klopp’s intention was to inject belief and fearlessness. “The plan was to jump in Barcelona’s face from the first second, so if we failed, we failed in our own way,” the manager explained during our discussion about the subsequent victory. “We had nothing to lose that night. We wanted to make Barcelona uncomfortable from the first kick. And that is what we did.
“So far in my life, it is the greatest game I was ever part of, and one of the greatest ever, for sure. Maybe it was not against the Barcelona of Xavi [Hernández] and [Andres] Iniesta, but they were good enough to win the competition and good enough to beat us. But not good enough to beat the team they faced at Anfield that night.”
When embarking on the venture to analyse this and the 10 other acclaimed fixtures in this book, I thought it useful to ask Klopp how he defines a truly great game.
“Drama,” he replied. “What stays longer in the memory of all the people involved is when the drama is there. The great games in history have a story. What is the situation before the game? What are the chances for both teams to win?
“A lot of what makes a game great has to do with expectation. In our case, no one thought we would have a chance. Playing against a team like Barcelona and being 3-0 down? Winning that is not easily done, eh? But most important of all in any great game comes the performance. You cannot have the drama without that. It will not be a great game if the players do not show up. The performance must be really good.”
Klopp has never aspired to copy the slower, patient passing game of Barcelona, seeing football as more about the consistent release of energy to sustain attacks. He once famously and colourfully described it as the difference between loud, heavy-metal football and the ‘silent song of an orchestra’.
This groove has visibly modified in recent years. Liverpool are now more capable of turning down the volume, lowering the tempo and making elaborate chord changes as necessary. On this night it had to be, and was, a wall of sound.
“I think you coach in a way that suits your personality,” Klopp explained. “Obviously I am not as much of an artist as Pep Guardiola was as a player, or others who were world-class. I had to work hard, and that is what I expect from my team.”
While Guardiola absorbed the teachings of Johan Cruyff and cites Marcelo Bielsa as an influence, Klopp was infatuated by the other guru of the age and a manager you will see namechecked in this book more than any other – AC Milan’s Arrigo Sacchi.
“Sacchi completely changed how we think about football,” said Klopp. “He is one of the most influential coaches in the history of the game and a complete game-changer for me. Because of him we had to judge the size of the pitch in a new way. I am sure you remember playing with man-marking tactics where you pretty much followed the opponent you were marking to the toilet. The pitch always felt incredibly big. Nobody played a high [defensive] line because many teams played the libero [sweeper]. Before him I was told who to mark and that was it. Too often the team with the better individuals won the game because it was all one-versus-one challenges all over the pitch, so if the other player was better than you, how could you win? Sacchi’s organisation made it completely different.
“I did not learn it from Sacchi, but it was my manager at Mainz, Wolfgang Frank, who brought it to us, which meant as a player I watched five hundred videos of AC Milan. I saw how whenever Franco Baresi raised his arms to play offside, everyone else in the team was waiting. Ball orientated defending became a real tool, and of course on top of that Milan were a sensational team with Ruud Gullit, Marco van Basten and Baresi. They were some of the best players ever.
“So that was all part of my tactical training. From then on we had four sessions a week where we did not see the ball. That was maybe too much! But pretty much overnight we became a successful football team. We were not easy to deal with. We defended really well and it opened my mind. That was the basis for me when I became a manager, and still is. Organisation is the basis for football.”
The Greatest Games by Jamie Carragher (Bantam Press, RRP £20). Buy now for £16.99 at books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514.
