Jürgen Klopp - Liverpool FC Manager

When you absorb the words of Klopp from the article Az posted, it is clear that we have a very determined man who wants to deliver the title & other silverware.

Wants to end his career here? That would be amazing as it would be a glorious dominating era for us once more.

When you absorb the words of Klopp from the article Az posted, it is clear that we have a very determined man who wants to deliver the title & other silverware.

Wants to end his career here? That would be amazing as it would be a glorious dominating era for us once more.

As long as he's not planning on ending his career here for a long, long time.

One of my biggest reservations about Klopp (before we signed him) was that his tactics were too focused on playing without the ball.  I'm a believer that the best teams are great with the ball and know how to use possession not only in attack, but also as a form of defense -- keeping the ball to protect a lead. 

Well, big kudos to the gaffer -- he has tweaked his approach to allow us to be better with the ball.  We aren't a 1 trick pony who can only score on the counter.  We are more elegant in possession now -- we work the ball around to create different angles, pull teams back and forth to expose gaps in the defense, and then attack. Yet we still maintain that lethal ability to counter-press and score quick goals from turnovers and transitions.  We have a multifaceted attack now, and that is down to the tactical adjustments made by Klopp. 

Keep up the great work Jürgen!!  Can't wait to see you celebrating at the end of the season with one of these!! 

We often sees the negative side of things and often forget on the positives. I need to be fair when I judge Klopp. He is not having a start-studded team of players, neither Shankly nor Paisley or the rest had that privilege before but these great managers had the players playing like champions was because the managers knew how to exploit the players' strengths to the fullest and get them to play as a cohesive unit and making them belief that they can win every match irrespective who the opponent is and we steam-rolled past clubs all over Europe. I highly suspect that Klopp studied into the history of this club long before he joined this club and what he did in Dortmund pretty resembles that. Certainly he needs no introduction into our history and he may be already implementing the right things that we did years ago and whiskey nose pretty much knows that.

Let's not get carried away, Klopp still needs to tweak a few things here and there and get more reinforcements in to make us better and we need to give him time and rest assure he'll stumble here and there along the way and that is expected. More importantly, the owners need to give Klopp the full support in everything he does.

I just feel Jürgen has the bollocks for it. I might be steaming but he has it for me I think he has what we call panache

He earned his wage yesterday for sure... I was left fuming and screaming at the TV during the first half yesterday asking myself where is the intensity, movement and what happened to our passing game?
Well at the end of the first half it started looking better and whatever he said to them at Halftime, worked...coz we played much better allround and deserved the win.
Well done JK, that's the perfect response to turn some more doubters into believers.

This sums up yesterday's game against Swansea. I love this guys. He turned the game on its head with his passion and team talk halfway through.

https://twitter.com/WengerTactic/status/782296907746082816

Jürgen Klopp: There's no time for reflection, so I don't want a cake!

Jürgen Klopp is interested only in looking forward as he approaches his first anniversary as Liverpool manager.

This Saturday marks a full year since Klopp took charge at Anfield, with the 12 months since October 8 2015 having been an eventful mix of highs and lows.

Brilliant, exhilarating performances against the likes of both Manchester clubs, Southampton and Borussia Dortmund were among the highlights of last season, which also included the disappointment of losing in two cup finals.

Klopp’s first full season on Merseyside has started promisingly, with superb victories at Arsenal and Chelsea, along with Anfield demolitions of Leicester City and Hull City, helping the Reds to sit two points off the top of the Premier League as the second international break of the campaign begins.

However, the boss has no appetite to consider what has happened over the last year, and is instead fully focused on the future.

“I have no time, and I am not in the mood for reflection, to be honest,” Klopp said after Saturday's 2-1 win at Swansea City.

“It’s a year, I’m a year older and all this, but everything else is good. Not perfect, but in a good way. That’s what we hoped, that’s what we said.

“After one year standing here, we can talk like this. There was doubt, there was a lot of rumour around me. People said ‘obviously he was a good coach at Dortmund but a German managing here doesn’t work’ things like this. That’s better now.

“The thing is, I’m not here for a year, I’m here hopefully for the long term, and it means that we have to use all the information we have until now and learn from it.

“That’s how life works, collecting experience, learning from it and being ready for the next challenge.

“My year is what, October 8, yes? We will not celebrate, I can tell you that! Hopefully nobody brings me a cake!”

Klopp, who signed a new long-term contract with Liverpool in July, continued: “We have to create hope, dreams, whatever. The only problem is that we cannot hope and we cannot dream!

“Everyone else is allowed [to dream]. So far this season it’s a very positive thing to talk about but we have to go out and do it.

“I liked the club before I was here, but when you are in it, it is so different.

“This club has a lot of work to do, it’s not about enjoying the history, it’s about being part of it. And being a part of it is nice.”


http://www.liverpoolfc.com/news/first-team/238100-Jürgen-klopp-there-s-no-time-for-reflection-so-i-don-t-want-a-cake

Klopp: Reds must be prepared for Swansea battle every week

Jürgen Klopp believes Liverpool's first-half performance during their 2-1 victory over Swansea City on Saturday provides the perfect example of why his players cannot afford to get carried away when the going is good.

The Reds had claimed four straight wins in all competitions prior to their trip to the Liberty Stadium, where they were set to face an opponent with just four Premier League points to their name after six fixtures.

But the opening 45 minutes made a mockery of both teams' respective positions, as the Swans came flying out of the traps to claim an eighth-minute lead, which they were perhaps unfortunate not to extend before the break.

The visitors were facing an uphill task as they headed back out for the second half, but put on a massively improved performance that was rewarded as three points were secured through Roberto Firmino's header and a James Milner penalty.

And, while Klopp was understandably delighted to have seen his team turn things around against the odds in south Wales, he cited the first half as evidence that the Reds need to be at their best in every game.

"It was such a positive week: Interview here, interview there, ‘the manager is brilliant’, ‘everyone is enjoying themselves’," he said.

"And then at the end of the week, Swansea is waiting with the knife between the teeth, and you have to go and perform again!

"That’s what I mean. We have to get used to it. To be a successful team you need to be a challenger in each game, challenging for three points in every game.

"I’m happy with the performance from the [fans], it was great! We didn’t make it too easy for them, but you saw that they took each good moment from us to help us back in the game. That was nice."

Klopp went on to reveal that he had seen no signs in training that Liverpool would make a lacklustre start against Francesco Guidolin's men.

But he also vowed to ensure his team are ready to show their best at exactly the right moment in future.

"In situations like this, you see one or two sessions in the week and you think ‘Oh my God, it was so good!’ And it’s really difficult to keep that level up," he added.

"We had one session this week where everybody was ‘wow’! We had 22 players on the pitch and every single one was angry, greedy, clear, hot, however you want to say it. And you think ‘Oh my God, what was that?!’

"The problem is, there is one time in the week where you really need all this stuff. And that’s in the game. Of course you prepare in training, so you can rely on it in the game. That’s what I say.

"We will learn to push the button in the right moment, to train all during the week to prepare for this game.

http://www.liverpoolfc.com/news/first-team/238094-klopp-reds-must-be-prepared-for-swansea-battle-every-week

Not strictly about Klopp but about the trends that Klopp's Liverpool are helping set. From The Guardian:

So: how’s it been for you? As the Premier League takes a breath, sucks on half an orange, and smears some soothing embrocation across a vivid set of autumnal bruises, this seems like an ideal moment to sit back and review a particularly frantic opening act.

For the first time in some time the Premier League feels like a slightly different place this year. With seven games gone and an international break now upon us the season already has a distinct tone and texture. Above all there has been a quickening of the pulse. The volume remains the same. What has changed is the tempo, the physicality, the sense of an evolved, thrillingly concussive style reaching a new pitch.

Teams have always run and closed down (Emile Heskey was a pretty hot gegenpresser; so was Ian Rush). But not perhaps with such panache, such a concerted sense of purpose, or indeed with such fanfare among the tactical cognoscenti. Trends, styles and counter-styles tend to come and go. For now this seems to be the pattern. We may be less than a fifth of the way in, but it already looks like being an exhausting, exhilarating season. Welcome to the new, slightly more painful frontier.

In outline, not much has changed in English football’s top tier. The post-Leicester City world looks a lot like the pre-Leicester City one. Manchester City are top. Sunderland, kings of the stuttering, belching false start, are bottom again in autumn. Premier League teams had scored one more goal combined than the current tally of 196 at the same stage in each of the last two years. Despite some early alarm over the anti-grappling rules the number of set-piece goals is holding steady. Shots per game, proportion of counterattacking goals, number of draws, points gap between the top and bottom teams: none of this has shifted,

And yet the league does seem different. A paradox of Leicester’s brilliantly-executed title victory was the fact it masked an essentially mediocre season elsewhere. Arsenal conjured up the most jeeringly-received second-place finish in recent memory. The champions Chelsea disintegrated. Manchester United congealed into a weekly theatre of pain. Manchester City spent half the season killing time. Tottenham had a moment of uplift. West Ham and a few others had good seasons. Otherwise the general tone was disappointment, teams not so much being built as allowed to moulder grandly. Had it been one of the usual cast cantering away with the title after Christmas the season would have been written off by now as a forgotten boredom.

This year feels like the upswing. What stands out, as had always seemed likely given the wave of new TV money and the presence of a hardcore of elite coaches, is the sense of progress in train, of teams and systems being furiously nailed together on the hoof. The current top seven teams are all at a bullish stage in their development. Mid-table has plenty of hopeful recent arrivals. The bottom three are all flailing middleweights, West Ham’s current haplessness a particular source of grim fascination.

In the middle of this a certain style has taken hold. Tottenham’s defeat of Manchester City on Sunday afternoon feels like a high point of this newly jacked-up Premier League, a brutal, engrossing blend of relentless forward movement. Tottenham didn’t just press City, they surrounded them, crowding the space, cutting off the angles, always looking to win the ball and launch a counterpunching attack.

 It was exhausting to watch. Mauricio Pochettino was exhausting to watch, a manager who has adapted his Bielsa-ish dogma about football as a game of running into a blueprint for this engaging young Tottenham team. Not that City are likely to be outrun often. Their best win of the season, the 2-1 at Old Trafford, was built around a period of crisp, targeted early pressing that disrupted United’s ponderous central block. Counter-measures will be taken. They will be back.

Liverpool are a natural point of comparison here. When the international break ends it will be almost exactly a year since Jürgen Klopp arrived at Anfield. His first game was a breathless and incoherent 0-0 draw at Tottenham, a case of two teams basically running into each other. Twelve months on Liverpool look a genuinely alluring prospect, a team with a wonderful fluency in attack and a driving sense of togetherness.

These are early days both in the season and the evolution of the main contenders. But whoever finishes ahead of Liverpool will do so bloodied and blistered and breathless. City travel to Anfield on New Year’s Eve. How Pep Guardiola – who saw this coming, who understands the process as well as anyone – plans to counter the sheer dripping hunger of Klopp’s forward press will be fascinating to see.

The sense of fury, of a new kind of muscle-ball in train extends further down the league. Arsenal have bulked up. Below them teams like Watford, Bournemouth and Burnley have succeeded not by defending like titans or becoming stodgily hard to beat but by playing with a similar blend of movement and aggressive team-defence.

It isn’t hard to see where this has come from. This same kind of Total Physicality, not just energy but brilliantly drilled team movements, has been part of Diego Simeone’s success at Atlético Madrid. The ability to analyse and pick apart an opponent’s movement with the help of data and panoramic replays has helped. Just as Leicester showed that it is possible to win a league title simply by repeating more or less the same set of movements with supremely single-minded craft and skill. The baseline for success now is a willingness to work ceaselessly, to dominate the space where the game is played.

The last time there was a similar uplift in intensity and physicality in the Premier League was just over a decade ago. José Mourinho’s Chelsea MK1, the Liverpool of peak Steven Gerrard, Alex Ferguson’s last great Manchester United team: all of these had powerful runners and played at a relentless pace. The bar was raised elsewhere as a result. There is a certain circularity here given the relative ponderousness of Mourinho’s current United, the sense that his own methods have perhaps ossified while a new urgency has arrived elsewhere.

It remains to be seen whether the same bruising intensity can be maintained through the slog of winter and spring. On another front Monaco’s canny, counter-attacking defeat of Spurs at Wembley suggests it might not be so easy to run through gnarlier European opponents. It does, though, promise to be an engrossing, unceasing spectacle between now and the next pause for breath.

I just feel Jürgen has the bollocks for it. I might be steaming but he has it for me I think he has what we call panache

Or as in Stuart Little  .........   Moxie.

Decent article on him in October's Four Four Two, short enough just to read at the shop if you're feeling cheap

Here's a bit I particularly liked:

(Following the defeat in Basel)
'As for the atmosphere at the pre-planned post-match party at their Basel hotel? You've probably guessed. It started like a wake, with many of the players facing up to uncertainty over their futures as the summer began, but the mood picked up with a few drinks and then soared dramatically after Klopp called them into a huddle on the dancefloor and said: "Two hours ago you felt like sh*t. Now hopefully you all feel a bit better. Listen: this is just the start for us. We will play in many more finals." With that, he started singing, "We are Liverpool, tra la la la". His players joined in the sing-song and immediately the mood was lifted. He's that kind of manager. He leads. His players follow.'

https://twitter.com/TaintlessRed/status/783970707239800832

Close?

https://twitter.com/TaintlessRed/status/783970707239800832

Close?

The fact that we've faced a lot less shots but conceeded more goals shows Mignolets decline.

The fact that we've scored more goals without Suarez in the team is a testament to Klopp also.

I think it's also unfair to judge Klopp to closely to Rodgers yet as half of his management time was played with players Rodgers/TC/DOF signed.

https://twitter.com/TaintlessRed/status/783970707239800832

Close?

One word for this stat: Suarez.

The fact that we've faced a lot less shots but conceeded more goals shows Mignolets decline.

The fact that we've scored more goals without Suarez in the team is a testament to Klopp also.

I think it's also unfair to judge Klopp to closely to Rodgers yet as half of his management time was played with players Rodgers/TC/DOF signed.

I agree mate, although it does include 7 games in Jürgen's second season and none from Brendan's second "nearly" season.

Take Jürgen's cup runs into account and it puts a different complexion on things, but league alone I think it's  surprisingly close. After all Brendan didn't have the benefit of all the "wonderful signings" we made with the Suarez and Stirling money in his first season while Jürgen did

We didn't sign Mignolet till Brendan's second season mate, so more likely he's always been that bad

Take Jürgen's cup runs into account and it puts a different complexion on things, but league alone I think it's  surprisingly close.

Be a little bit less close when they've both played 38 games and we've got another 3 points and another 5 goals.

Be a little bit less close when they've both played 38 games and we've got another 3 points and another 5 goals.

Hopefully J.D. hopefully not counting my chickens against the mancs mate.

I just found it interesting that with all the "improvements to the squad" Brendan only had Coutinho and Sturridge(half a season) while Jürgen has also had the benefit of  Clyne, Lallana, Firmino, Lovren, Sakho, Can etc etc. that they were so close after 37/38 games in so many areas.

Fair enough that Brendan had Suarez, Gerrard and Reina in his first season.

https://twitter.com/TaintlessRed/status/783970707239800832

Close?

Close enough. In the interests of fairness it should also be pointed out that Klopp has inherited a much better squad than Rodgers did. Nonetheless, let's hope he goes one better over the next 38 games, than Rodgers did and avoids the mistakes made in his third season in charge.

In the interests of fairness it should also be pointed out that Klopp has inherited a much better squad than Rodgers did

Klopp was also 'juggling' his squad for Thursday night Europa games in fairness, without that distraction, no pre-season, coming in October etc, Klopp would have possibly fared much better.

Klopp was also 'juggling' his squad for Thursday night Europa games in fairness, without that distraction, no pre-season, coming in October etc, Klopp would have possibly fared much better.

Brendan had to juggle his squad for Thursday night Europa games too mate. Brendan played 12 Europa games Jürgen played 15. (Kenny won the League cup to qualify the season before)

Brendan had to juggle his squad for Thursday night Europa games too mate. Brendan played 12 Europa games Jürgen played 15. (Kenny won the League cup to qualify the season before)

Aye slipped my mind that, still Rodgers added to the squad in the summer, had a preason before playing his 38 games and added Cout's and Sturridge in January, Klopp had 31 games without adding to the squad, no significant signings in jan other than an emergency meeting loan deal to cover an injury crisis.

Its like comparing chalk & cheese to be honest, too many variables at play.

https://twitter.com/TaintlessRed/status/783970707239800832

Close?

Jürgen picked up a squad who were so mentally fragile they were terrified of losing such was their lack of confidence.


Anyway both started off well, one ultimately failed let's see what happens with Jürgen.

Didn't Brendan have 2 summer windows in which to work with at this stage? Klopp has had one.