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FANTASY FOOTBALL
Dave Kidd: Jurgen Klopp and Zinedine Zidane will give us chaos, charisma and a classic Champions League final
Liverpool boss Klopp was brimming with confidence on the eve of his second final in the competition
Liverpool boss Klopp was brimming with confidence on the eve of his second final in the competition
IT was a question about Zinedine Zidane’s hopeless tactics which had Jurgen Klopp roaring with laughter.
The Liverpool boss joked: “If people think Zidane does not have much tactical knowledge, . . . what would that say about the game?
“It is really funny that two coaches who have no clue about tactics have reached the final.”
The German was brimming with humour and bursting with charisma as he met the European media 24 hours before the Champions League final.
With Liverpool having scored a record 40 goals as they cavorted their way across the Continent en route to Kiev, and Real Madrid having rattled up 30 themselves, nobody is expecting a stereotypically cagey showdown here tonight.
And when you listened to Klopp laughing along with the idea this would be an occasion for glorious chaos; for ‘we’re gonna score one more than you’ playground football, it raised expectations all the more. Yeah, the Anfield boss chuckled sarcastically, Zidane’s going for a third Champions League triumph in 2½ years as a manager.
He must be some kind of clown, this bloke.
Klopp buttered up his opposite number, describing the Frenchman as one of the five greatest players of all time — which is undoubtedly true, given Zidane had feet made out of velvet.
The Anfield coach added: “I have to expect that he is brilliant, just as he was as a player.
“I have seen his team and it works like a clock from Switzerland.
“It is chaos when it needs to be chaos, but he has world-class players. Zidane was a fighter all his life, he grew up in Marseilles. He didn’t need to fight as a player, because he was so much better than everyone else.
“I heard the other day when someone made him angry by asking about his hunger.
“I’d have been angry with that question, and I grew up in a village in the Black Forest, not in Marseilles!”
Later, when Zidane was asked to compare himself to Klopp, he cheekily replied: “As a player? . . . ”
Good knock-about stuff, just as the match promises to be.
History suggests this will be a final for the ages. Real Madrid’s 12 European Cups sees them streets ahead of any other club.
Liverpool’s five sets them apart from the rest of England.
More importantly, form suggests a classic too — a match to rank alongside Liverpool’s 2005 Miracle of Istanbul or Real’s magnificent 7-3 success over Eintracht Frankfurt back in 1960.
Cristiano Ronaldo versus Mo Salah is a mouth-waterer. These two extraordinary men have scored 95 GOALS between them this season.
Klopp spoke glowingly about Ronaldo and his nemesis Lionel Messi, of their incredible consistency — effectively telling Salah he was years away from joining them among the true global elite.
Yet the remarkable individual campaigns of Ronaldo and Salah have only been made possible by the ‘lock up your daughters’ philosophies of their managers.
The Champions League is some tournament these days, thanks to men like Klopp and Zidane and their willingness to toss caution to the wind.
Liverpool have been making a habit of blitzing teams early on in Europe. Real have form for winning games late.
The only certainty tonight would seem to be goals.
A third straight Champions League and a fourth in five years would mark this current Real team out as all-time greats of the game, no matter how far they finished behind Barcelona domestically.
For Klopp’s Liverpool it is all about making the breakthrough from entertaining nearly men to genuine winners.
Klopp has lost five straight finals with Liverpool and Dortmund, while it is six years since the Reds lifted a trophy.
And yet they don’t look or sound like a group of men shackled by bad memories.
Skipper Jordan Henderson, so unlucky not to be handed the captain’s armband by England boss Gareth Southgate, spoke of Liverpool’s desperation to create their own history.
Henderson has developed a genuine rapport with the Anfield faithful.
This is a bloke who followed his own beloved Sunderland to Wembley, incognito, for a League Cup final a few years ago.
And he demanded that the travelling Scousers make Kiev’s Olympic Stadium ‘feel like Anfield’ tonight.
Yet for all the talk of special European nights at their atmospheric old home, Klopp’s team have often been buccaneering on foreign fields this term.
They never set out to stifle or contain.
Modern football is a game analysed half to death by statisticians and tactical wonks.
And yet here at the absolute pinnacle of the club game are two teams promising rich entertainment.
This one really ought to be fun. And fun’s what it’s supposed to be all about.
