Good riddance to this guy.
I’m so tired of his whining and crying after losing or dropping points. On Sunday, he did it again after Liverpool came to Old Trafford and drew 2-2 with a subpar Manchester United. “I’m really sorry to say it but we should have won both games [after losing in the Cup] and didn’t,” he said after his final Northwest Derby match before his scheduled departure as Liverpool manager. “That’s our fault.”
Klopp was right in the sense that Liverpool were clearly the better team on Sunday. United played a dreadful first half managed to steal the lead in the second half thanks to a bad backpass that Bruno Fernandes smartly intercepted and fired into an empty net from the midfield circle and then a wonder strike from our latest phenom, who’s been one of our best players this season. We would have won had Aaron Wan-Bissaka not conceded a soft penalty in the 82nd minute. Hey, at least it wasn’t deep into second half stoppage time again.
Thankfully, Klopp didn’t add to his laundry list of bizarre excuses for bad results that’s become a running joke in English football. Like in 2019, when he blamed United players getting injured and substituted for hurting Liverpool’s rhythm. Or in 2021, where he accused United of getting a lot of penalties even though his side got more (there’s a reason why they’re known as LiVARpool). Or in matches with other clubs where he blamed, among other things, fixture congestion, the weather (wind, cold, precipitation, lack of precipitation, etc.), the ball, television networks, God and witches.
That being said, I still wish we had hired him instead of David Moyes or Louis van Gaal. Then again, given how incompetent our board has been and how disinterested our owners have been, it’s probable that Klopp wouldn’t have gotten the support and time that he would have needed to really turn things around. After all, he didn’t win silverware at Liverpool until his third full season — neither Moyes, van Gaal nor Jose Mourinho made it that far at United. Had he taken the United job, Klopp probably would have flamed out and gotten the sack within a year or two. Who knows where he’d be now — maybe managing a mid-table team in England or going through the Bayern Munich grinder like Thomas Tuchel?
Plus, maybe if we had hired him, we wouldn’t have experienced some of the ass-kickings we have over the last few years. There was last year’s 7-0 shellacking the week after United won the League Cup and the 9-0 aggregate result in the league in the 2021-2022 season. In fact, Klopp’s record against United at Liverpool is 7 wins, 9 draws and 5 losses in all competitions — not as good as his record against Manchester City or Arsenal, but still pretty good. He may have been an excuse-maker, but it’s not like he had to do it very often.
“I did an interview with [Klopp] a couple of years ago,” Former Liverpool striker Robbie Fowler said to the Daily Mirror, “and he told me he turned down a couple of super-rich clubs after Dortmund – one of them was definitely Manchester United, the other probably Real Madrid – because he hated how they were focused solely on commercial influences.”
Unlike his other excuses, that one actually holds some water.
