A successful season whatever the outcome

Long read alert.

What a time to be a Liverpool fan. I am publishing this on the last day of the 2017/2018 season, before Liverpool take on Brighton at home requiring a point for qualification into next seasons Champions League. I hope we do this comfortably, but whatever happens I have been so happy with the progress made this season that I am easily able to look forward and see the bigger picture than worry about what happens today, frustrating though it would be to lose.

Like most sensible Liverpudlian’s I have spent this season marvelling at the football that Jurgen Klopp has the team playing. I’ve watched most of the games on TV, a few late night-ers while in Asia excluded, and have seen the team grow and develop as the season has progressed. How it has matured, and how it went from being ‘great in attack but leaky at the back’, to a solid unit that systematically destroyed teams when it went forward, one that with Virgil Van Dijk installed at centre back and Andy Robertson at left back, became an assured defensive unit that gelled with the rest of the team and provided the solid foundations from which to build wave after wave of attack. A defence that wouldn’t crumble as soon as the attacking football took a breather and the opposition started knocking at the door. Ignore the recent games where we have leaked a few late goals, that’s more to do with fatigue creeping in once a position of dominance is already established. The football Liverpool have played this year requires absolute focus as well as lots of running, and it does take its toll. The fans and the adrenalin of chasing something can carry you along, but when that urgency is lessened or removed, then the tiredness can rear its head, psychologically as well as physically.

I was inspired to write this blog post while watching the Champions League semi-final second leg with Roma. Deep in the hearts of many Liverpool fans, certainly the older ones, we knew that a place in the final was nailed on despite leaking 2 goals to ‘only’ take a 5-2 lead into the second leg. But those fans old enough to remember the golden years of the 70’s and 80’s also remember that complacency and arrogance are the football fans worst enemy. Jurgen Klopp is almost like a hardened Liverpool fan. You can tell that he has been scarred by previous flirtations with complacency, and that he’s someone who doesn’t need any more reminders. He drills it into his players just like he drills their minds to make them a success, which I’ll come back to shortly.

So let’s go back to that game. Between the first and second leg, Roma’s chances were talked up by everyone, pundits from both sides making sure that it was clear Roma still had a hope. Their result against Barcelona in the quarter-final was what gave everybody the caution and more importantly for them, the press had something to talk about. Had Liverpool not leaked two late goals, the game would absolutely have been a dead-rubber. There wouldn’t have been much of a story, and that’s not really what Uefa wants of its semi-finals in its prestigious club competition. Queue the escalation of Roma’s chances.

But that result against Barcelona was exactly what allowed Jurgen Klopp to prepare his team for this game without complacency. There he had it, possibly the greatest club team in modern football, defeated 3-0 and knocked out of the competition that they so want to excel in to reduce the European trophy deficit against their arch-rivals Real Madrid. So you have Jurgen Klopp, a careful manager who has tasted all the highs and lows that football has to offer, with a pre-prepared tale rolled up under his arm, ready to talk to his team about in the pre-match preparations. Add to that the fact that Roma needed to score 3 times against a team who are the best in Europe on the counterattack, and you have a reason to stay calm about the likelihood of losing this match.

The game itself was a funny one, enjoyable and kept entertaining for those neutrals by how the game played out. Whilst nervous, I was never really that worried, even when the [shouldn’t have been a] penalty was awarded. It was just too late in the game to have an impact. It was always going to be this way due to the score from the first leg and also the Barcelona result. A full stadium of 70,000 mostly home fans was always going to raise the roof and cheer their team on against all hope. But with such a lead, Jurgen Klopp would never let his team miss out on such a golden opportunity.
What stood out for me though was how the post-match interviews with Klopp and some of his players show just what an impact he has had, and how he is shaping a team in his own image, or more importantly with his own mindset. You could see it in the performance on the night, Sadio Mane was many people’s man of the match but what I liked about his performance wasn’t just his attacking threat, but his defending. Klopp likes his teams to defend from the front, which is why he and ‘Bobby’ Firmino are made for each other, and why Adam Lallana has a chance for a place on the bench of the final providing he shows his fitness and stays healthy. On the night v Roma, Mane did a lot of helping out in front of Andy Robertson, and Firmino too for that matter was quite deep a lot of the time, doing the hard graft without the ball (another reason why he’s underappreciated by many outside Anfield).

It's obviously too early to compare Klopp with Shankly and Paisley until he’s won some trophies, but he displays similarities with both which are remarkable and as a fan, they whet the appetite and build on the hope that Jurgen might just be the man to help rebuild this great club and put it back on its perch, and build something longstanding, not unlike the man who put the foundations in place, Bill Shankly.

Klopp is like Shankly in that he’s getting more out of players by getting inside their heads and understanding what is needed to give them the confidence to reach their potential. I’m pretty sure that not all of Shankly’s signings were the best players, but they had that personality that he could influence to squeeze an extra 10% out of them. And with players at the highest level, the standards and quality have thin margins of difference, and so the actual improvements would be from attitude, behaviour, spirit, belief.

Klopp has also helped recreate ‘the holy trinity’, that bond between players and fans. He was given some stick early on in his Liverpool managerial career for celebrating a draw in front of the Kop, but the fruits of that labour are now visible, as witnessed at the end of the Roma second leg. "At a football club, there's a holy trinity - the players, the manager and the supporters….” Although Shankly went on to exclude the club’s directors in this, yet another of his famous quotes, the point is that Klopp has recreated that bond. The fans love Klopp, they love the players again, and the players love Klopp and are acknowledging the role that the fans have to play.

A good leader will be able to not only influence the people in his charge, but you will hear them reciting what they have been inspired to believe, because they believe it. As well as his performance in the match, an interview afterwards by Sadio Mane with the Liverpool Echo encapsulated all the things that are so good about Klopp’s management of Liverpool at the moment.

"We have a lot of respect for Madrid, they are one of the best teams in the world, but we are Liverpool," Mane said.
"We are strong, we can beat any team in the world. We believe that. So we believe we can go there and beat them.
"We are going to go there and fight for the fans, for the club, and play without fear to try to win the final.
"We have the players, we know we can score goals, we have shown that and there is nothing to be afraid of for us."

And later in the interview…

"Maybe it was one of my best ever performances. I always work hard to do this standard of game. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
"But we try to give it because we want to give it to the people. But it's more important to be here for the team, and to be together in these most important moments.
"I believe we should do better in that second half. After half-time it was a little bit difficult because we did not play so well.
"We came through it, we have our dream still, we are going to go and work hard for this kind of moment – where we can be more clinical and concentrate harder.”
"Everybody was dancing, like crazy. Everybody was so happy, dancing together, we enjoyed the moment together," he said.
"It was special to be in that dressing room, such an incredible moment."

Everything Sadio Mane has said here shows that Klopp has really instilled his beliefs into his players, that he has created a team full of top talent that is also working as a team, just like the great LFC teams of the past used to, and just like Alex Ferguson used to do when he had man utd playing at the peak of their powers in the 90’s. It’s all about the team and everyone knows and believes that, and they all believe that if they stick together, they can overcome any challenge.
Mane’s views were echoed by Dejan Lovren in his post-match interviews. This excerpt was taken from a piece in the Guardian on the same theme.

“Why should we fear them?” asked Lovren. “They should fear us. They are quite confident but we don’t care for that – we are focused on our job.”

Lovren insists the team have also regained their pride under the German, irrespective of the outcome in Kiev. “He has changed many things in the club, not just the players but things around the club - people, he has changed the mentality, how we think. Everything is more positive now. Even when we sometimes don’t play good he always finds something good and there is not negativity.

“He deserves this. It is not accidental that he already reached the final of the Champions League in 2013 with Borussia Dortmund. He has given the club pride back. Everyone feels that, everyone lives that. Everyone should be proud that we have a manager like him.”

Mindset is crucial in making a difference at the highest level of sport. It’s why sports psychologists like Steve Peters have made a successful career and is attributed to the success of British Cycling for so long. But some people have this natural flair with psychology that allows them to flourish in their field, and Klopp is clearly one of them. I believe that the similarities with Shankly and Paisley are due to this natural psychological ability to understand people, and what makes them tick. This ability to create collective spirit in a group and make them more than the sum of the parts, is all down to understanding the dynamics of group behaviour mixed with understanding each of those parts, and knowing how to make them fit into the machine. Because that’s what Klopp’s teams have in common with Shankly and Paisley – they created machines where the parts, or players, were interchangeable.

For those with a natural talent in people psychology, success will be sustained and repeatable. Those who have to work at it and ‘impose psychological behaviour’ on themselves to then influence others can do it for a time, but most likely when other pressures mount, when life or environmental circumstances change, then they can veer off track a little, not having the energy or ability to manage multiple challenges concurrently. I think this is best demonstrated by Mourinho who can successfully gel a team for a while, but too often it falls apart when the pressure mounts.

And so regardless of the outcome today against Brighton and against Real Madrid in Kiev, I think that in Jurgen Klopp Liverpool FC have found the perfect managerial fit, a man who is demonstrating what can be achieved with belief, patience, trust, determination, and the utter conviction that if you build a team with those characteristics too, you will succeed in the long run.

Having lost his previous Champions League final (in fact his last 5 cup final’s!), Jurgen has just the right attitude for making the most of the opportunity and getting the most out of his players. Hearing how he spoke after the Roma match is music to my ears, when he said something like…

“Everybody will remind me of this now before the final from now on, that I’ve lost the last 5, but life is like this and the only chance you have to win a final is to go there, and we will try it again.”