Why Jurgen Klopp is right to call bullshit on the new Jose Mourinho narrative

Jurgen Klopp is right to call bullshit.

He is right to insist that reports of Jose Mourinho’s demise have been greatly exaggerated and he is right to treat his opposite number at Manchester United with the respect that his magnificent managerial record deserves.

It might have become all too easy for many in football to write off Mourinho, to view him as a yesterday’s man whose methods are finally being overtaken but of all people Klopp cannot afford to fall into that trap.

It was less than two years ago that Klopp was the one who had, apparently, been found out.

His Borussia Dortmund side was spiralling into exactly the kind of decline that critics of their manager had been waiting for. All of a sudden, gegenpressing wasn’t all that and the man who had made it the cornerstone of the way Dortmund played was past his sell by date.

No wonder, now in the guise of a manager who is suddenly back in fashion as Liverpool use the exact same methods to great effect, he has no time for the idea that Mourinho has stood still while others have progressed.

“It’s bullshit,” Klopp said. “Who says this? [That] he has started badly at United? They won their first games. So now you are giving B grades for winning? I try to play similar football to now with my former team and when we faced Real Madrid it was unbelievably difficult to play them.

“He knows how successful football works. To like or not like the way he plays, why should he care? Why should he care? How can I say who is on the way here and who is on the way there? If I lose against Manchester United you will stand here and ask me: ‘So..what about your ways..?’

“I am of course not interested and absolutely not part of the group that says Jose Mourinho was or has not been a good manager. He is a competitor. Without knowing him well, I know he will want to win this game.”

Of course an element of Klopp’s appraisal of Mourinho fits in with Bob Paisley’s favoured strategy of giving an adversary “some toffee.” There would be little to be gained had Klopp attempted to use the recent superiority in Liverpool’s form as a weapon with which to beat Mourinho.

Apart from setting himself and his team up for a possible fall, the Liverpool manager would also be making the team talk that will take place in the visitors’ dressing room at Anfield tonight a straightforward task for the Portuguese.

For all the emotion that Klopp displays on the touchline, he is a lot cuter than he is often given credit for and he recognises where and when to take the opportunity to try and kill an opponent with kindness. But more than that, he is aware of the perils of under-estimating someone who has achieved so much in the game. “He is a very successful and very experienced colleague,” Klopp added.

Liverpool have played patsy to Mourinho and the narrative that surrounds him before, none more so than on April 27, 2014, a day that the red half of Merseyside would love to forget but cannot help remembering.

If that was the day that Liverpool blew the title as a 2-0 defeat to Chelsea ground their juggernaut to a halt and opened up a clear path for Manchester City to win the Premier League, it was also one in which Mourinho gave arguably the strongest demonstration of the psychological hold he could exert over his own team and also their opponents.

Ever since that game, Steven Gerrard’s slip has taken all of the attention and, given its implications, that is entirely understandable but it has also helped obscure the job that Mourinho did on Liverpool both on the day itself and in the days leading up to it.

A lot of his antics during the build up have been forgotten but all of them were designed to get inside the heads of the Liverpool players, management and supporters and he succeeded.

From threatening “to play the kids” to allowing news to leak about an illness that could have prevented him from being on the touchline, he wanted Liverpool to wonder exactly what they would be facing because he wanted to cause doubt.

Mourinho was also acutely aware of what he called “the power of Anfield Road,” something that had hurt him in a pair of Champions League semi-finals in his first spell as Chelsea manager, so he set about using it against Liverpool whose desperation to end a 24-year wait to be crowned champions was so clear you could almost feel it.

In the same dressing room that he will occupy tonight, Mourinho told the Chelsea players that their job was not to go out and express themselves, it was to kill the game at every opportunity, to waste time and cause panic.

Even with a much changed team it was a plan that worked to perfection. Sat in the Main Stand that day, Jordan Henderson, who was suspended, recognised the job that Chelsea were doing on his own team. “It was frustrating for me,” he admitted. “I was a fan, I was in the crowd, it was frustrating to watch. I was shouting at the ref to get things going a bit quicker.

“It wasn’t a nice game to watch but full credit to Jose. It was tactically very good from him and he is a great tactician, he is a world class manager and he has shown that in the clubs he has been at. The way they played that game was very clever from Jose.

“We were on fire at the time and the way they played the game, very slow, sitting in, it was difficult to watch. They made it very difficult – throw ins, goal-kicks, they were taking forever and that got everyone worked up in the stadium and it worked to their advantage because they got the result they came for and it had a big impact on us winning the league. I will never really forget that.”

The difference between that occasion and this is that Mourinho did not need to win that game, but he needs to win this one and that means the pressure and the stakes are raised.

But whatever the situation, Liverpool have learned to their cost that in a one off fixture Mourinho has the ability to shape events his own way and that is why Klopp is calling bullshit.

He knows better than most that while Mourinho might hate that so many now view him as a busted flush, the United manager will be looking to use that to his advantage tonight.

There may well come a time to write Mourinho off, but that time is not now and Klopp when it does come will not be the one who does it.

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