Premier League Preview: Can Jurgen Klopp Do a Job on Manchester City?
There are few lonelier places in sport than a Premier League training ground during an international break.
It may be a break for those managers that send off their stack of stars to far-flung shores on the back of a victory, but for bosses bidding farewell with a chorus of boos haunting every other thought, it is a fortnight of purgatory at best.
Afternoons with the curtains drawn and Netflix for company are the reserve of the winning manager only.
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Left with those too young to be internationals or too old for national service, in numbers barely enough to scratch together a five-a-side game, the temptation for managers to dwell on both their own and players’ shortcomings must be high.
Jurgen Klopp has had just seven senior players to work with at Melwood since firing his charges across the continents with a collective boot up the derriere in the aftermath of a home defeat to Crystal Palace.
One suspects the German is not a man to dwell on defeats as others might, though.
The first loss of his Anfield tenure after a hat-trick of wins is unlikely to have turned him to drink ahead of Saturday’s dinner date with Manchester City. That being said, should both Sergio Aguero and David Silva be deemed fit to start, a surreptitious swig from a hip flask would be understandable, if not encouraged.
"I do hope I can play in this game. I’m doing everything in my power to get to the match in top condition," Aguero said of his potential return from a hamstring injury, per the Guardian.
"It’s been a frustrating time. Obviously the game against Newcastle [on 3 October] was special because it’s not every week you get to score five goals in one game!"
While Manuel Pellegrini will deliberate on whether to treat his star man with kid gloves or give the Argentinian an instant recall, Klopp faces a similar poser with Daniel Sturridge.
After a month on the sidelines with a knee injury, Liverpool’s perennially crocked talisman is champing at the proverbial bit to show his new boss what he’s all about against his former club.
Teaming Sturridge in an attacking triumvirate alongside Christian Benteke and Philippe Coutinho would certainly give Liverpool a little wonder to complement the ceaseless work rate Klopp takes as a given.
"I don't know what I'll do. I have to think about it. His quality is outstanding—we don't need to talk about that—but everybody needs training and today was the third full exercise with the team after four, five weeks' break," Klopp said on Thursday, per Sky Sports.
"But as a striker sometimes five minutes are enough, so we have to see. I'll start thinking about this after the press conference."
In any other season, the victory at Chelsea that Klopp masterminded in Liverpool’s last away game would have earned a feather in his cap that would be the envy of any peacock. This is not any other season, though, and with Jose Mourinho caught in a maelstrom of paranoia and persecution—imagined or otherwise—beating the champions no longer merits more than a perfunctory punch of the air.
A repeat of Klopp’s ebullient celebrations that so irked Mourinho are unlikely to entertain Pellegrini either, should they be repeated at the Etihad Stadium. The Chilean’s spiky animosity to those who encroach the sanctuary of his technical area is well known. Only Alan Pardew has rushed in (twice) where angels fear to tread. Only the truly irksome tend to rile Pellegrini.
Indeed, it is the disparity between his staid and measured rhetoric in relation to Klopp’s endearing—if slightly cloying at times—manner of always speaking straight from the heart that many see as the game’s most engaging subplot. In the dugouts, it’s very much a match of opposites.
Invariably, Klopp’s media briefings are conducted with the panache of a showman. It’s as though he uses a baton, such is the reverence a number use to relay his every utterance. Whether it’s a performance or sheer force of personality that radiates charm and charisma is largely irrelevant. Whatever it is, it makes for good copy.
If Klopp’s high energy is reflected on the field via the way his teams are set up to play, Pellegrini could not be less interested in the cult of his own personality. Klopp is the clown with the giant red boots and a horn; Pellegrini is of the sad variety that sport a single tear and scare small children.
The South American has perfected the art of the dull soundbite. To be fair, you know exactly what you’re going to get with Manuel: less than zero. Journalists leave his press conferences with a book full of doodles and a headache over how to fill a word count. His City team could not be further from the dour exterior of their manager, though; and make no mistake, that is what it is, an exterior persona he’s comfortable with projecting.
In each of the Premier League’s heaviest hitters, the manager is the biggest name at the club. Klopp, Mourinho, Arsene Wenger, Louis van Gaal. Think of Manchester City, and is the first name that springs to mind the manager? Or is it Aguero, Silva, Vincent Kompany or Yaya Toure?
It’s a relationship that suits both parties. For all of their wealth, there’s precious little that is ostentatious about Manchester City. The days of "Welcome to Manchester" Carlos Tevez billboards were buried with Garry Cook at a club now notoriously publicity-shy.
It’s a tactic that has served them well. They are now met with the same ambivalence projected toward any other big hitter with deep pockets, as opposed to the open hostilities that greeted their early lavish spending.
A further fascinating facet to the contest will be how far Klopp goes in terms of taking the game to City with his gegenpressing. Hunting high up the pitch worked a treat against a Chelsea side that has demonstrated a predilection to hand possession back to their opponents all season, but the danger against a City team that pops the ball about at will is that the home side will simply play through their visitors.
Playing too high against players willing to run beyond the ball leaves the back door open. If City can negate Liverpool’s energy, then Aguero, Kevin De Bruyne and Raheem Sterling could run riot on the counter. A run of 12 wins from 13 at home for City should prove a note of caution for Klopp, as could the fact they have managed two goals or more in each of these victories.
There’s so much to look forward to, and we’ve not yet even mentioned Sterling’s first appearance against the lover he left without so much as a note. Even a £49 million kiss-off won’t spare him a reception usually reserved for those who ply their trade across Manchester in red. Absence, in this case, has not so much made the heart grow fonder as intensified the desire to cut it out and ram it on a stick.
All in all, it should be quite the teatime treat.
Newcastle United vs. Leicester City, Saturday at 3 p.m. GMT
The tale of Jamie Vardy spending his formative years working in a Sheffield factory making carbon-fibre splints for collapsed foot arches has been told so often this season, Sean Bean won’t need to bother reading the script when he inevitably plays the Leicester City striker in a future biopic.
It’s a story worth telling, and only the true curmudgeon (or Newcastle United supporter) would fail to root for him passing a fitness test for Saturday’s game at St James’ Park, as he bids to equal Ruud van Nistelrooy's post-1992 record of scoring in 10 consecutive league matches. Prior to the inauguration of the Premier League, Jimmy Dunne holds the top-flight record, scoring in 12 straight Division One games for Sheffield United in 1931-32.
Vardy’s remarkable metamorphosis at the age of 28 from being Paul Dickov with pace to reportedly being courted—however spuriously—by the likes of Real Madrid, Barcelona and Manchester United is one of those rare occasions when sport transcends its usual parameters to cough up a genuine head-scratcher.
It needn’t take the mind of Rinus Michels to appreciate Vardy’s attributes: searing pace, incessant work rate and a calm head in front of goal. Even so, watching a man who was playing for Stocksbridge Park Steels five years ago terrorise the richest league in the world is only a searing soundtrack away from being a Hollywood tearjerker.
Claudio Ranieri will be forced to play against type as the hard-ass coach if he decides the hip and groin injuries that forced Vardy out of England’s friendlies with Spain and France will likewise prohibit his involvement at the weekend.
According to Sky Sports, Ranieri said:
"I don't know. Today he trained a little, tomorrow I hope he'll continue to train and on Saturday I will choose.
If he is fit, he will play. Every game he wants to play. I hope he is available. I speak every time with the doctor and the physio—if they say he is fit, 100 per cent, he will play. If not, he doesn't play.
For me it’s important he [Vardy] feels good—if he scores or not scores it’s not my problem. I’m thinking about other things, I’m thinking about Newcastle, not penalties or records because it will be a tough match.
"
Newcastle host their high-flying visitors having clambered out of the relegation places prior to the international interlude courtesy of a somewhat fortuitous defeat of Bournemouth. A further fillip to Steve McClaren will be the fact his side has won their last five home matches against Leicester in all competitions.
Leicester, though, will hardly be cowed by a trip north. Only Tottenham Hotspur (one) have suffered fewer defeats than Ranieri’s side this season, and while much has been made of the Foxes’ uncanny ability to come from behind, it would do disservice to the magnitude of their achievement to portray them simply as battlers enjoying a prolonged day in the sun.
They have scored at least two goals in seven of their last eight Premier League matches and have lost just once in 16 top-flight games.
Indeed, while it seems fanciful to argue they will still be challenging for a Champions League place in May, that they are currently just a point shy of the Premier League summit is neither fortuitous nor needing a caveat to explain it away.
Notwithstanding Vardy’s 12-goal contribution, if there has been a more edifying sight this season than Riyad Mahrez’s beguiling way with a football, tending to it with the delicate precision of a top chef plating food, it has passed by this writer.
On the opposite flank, Marc Albrighton has awoken from a deep slumber too, finally fulfilling a potential that fluttered briefly on his breakthrough at Aston Villa before seemingly being cocooned indefinitely thereafter.
All eyes will be on Vardy this Saturday, and rightly so, but Newcastle would be wise not to underestimate Leicester’s collective strength should Van Nistelrooy’s record prove to be under no immediate threat.
West Bromwich Albion vs. Arsenal, Saturday at 3 p.m. GMT
In Ray Bradbury’s prescient novel Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, firemen of the future start fires rather than put them out. Books are used as kindling, with ideas and philosophies seen as dangers to a society doing just fine in a world that celebrates trivial information over knowledge.
When over the international break Arsene Wenger gave an interview with L’Equipe supplement Sport and Style (via the Guardian), Twitter—in the UK at least—went into the type of slavering meltdown usually reserved for starved dogs on receipt of a bone. A man closing on his seventh decade was wearing turn-ups on his jeans in the accompanying photoshoot! Stop the presses! Here was a scoop worth getting excited about.
Forget translating an interview so rich in content and scope of subject it could have been Philip Roth being tackled in Paris Review; get the GIF/Vine guy on the blower so we can juxtapose Wenger and Vogue editor Anna Wintour on a runway.
It was some time later, a day perhaps, when French went through a linguistic grinder to come out in English. A tapestry of tweets had already held court on Wenger’s sartorial choices.
"Religiously, it is said that God created man. I am only a guide. I allow others to express what they have in them. I have not created anything. I am a facilitator of what is beautiful in man," mused Wenger, channelling his inner Camus.
"I define myself as an optimist. My constant battle in this business is to get out there what is beautiful in man. We can at this level portray me as naive. At the same time, it allows me to believe it and it often gives me reason."
Wenger’s ruminations on not just football, but also life and art, philosophy and religion, proved deeply compelling and, at times, perhaps even quietly moving. It also underlined how the Premier League’s most enduring character has survived an industry that sees patience as antiquated to the point of redundancy.
In seeing beyond the hyperbole of the media and supporters to stick true to principles many may find frustrating—but few would deny come from a good place—longevity has fended off the catcalls of instant gratification.
It is this unhealthy obsession with judging managers and players on an almost minute-by-minute basis that the Frenchman conceded had pained him the most during his longest of sojourns in England.
Per Tom Adams of Eurosport.co.uk, Wenger added:
"Being questioned on everything that has been done after every single loss, despite the consistency we’ve put in our work at the highest level. The immediate ‘chuck it all out’ reaction.
You have to find a balance between your masochistic capability to endure what you’re being put through and the pleasure of accomplishment.
Today, my masochistic capability must be bigger so as to express my passion. I’ve reached that point. I do many things that make me suffer.
"
So, then, if Arsenal can pick up three points on the road Saturday, the title is theirs to lose. Should they get beat at the Hawthorns, surely Wenger has to go.
Clock ticking for Mourinho and Costa: Chelsea vs. Norwich City, Saturday at 3 p.m. GMT
The old adage is, of course, that absence makes the heart grow fonder, yet it seems unlikely Mourinho's exile from the touchline in Chelsea's defeat at Stoke City prior to the international weekend will have had Roman Abramovich's beating organ all of a flutter.
The club's technical director, Michael Emenalo, told the Telegraph this week that despite recording just three wins from 12 Premier League games to date, the beleaguered Portuguese retains the faith of his board.
Anything other than a three-point haul against Norwich at Stamford Bridge on Saturday will surely test that patience to the limit.
Similarly, on Mourinho's part, patience must be wearing thin with Diego Costa. In the previous eight months, he has only troubled the scoresheet against Hull City, Sunderland, West Brom, Maccabi Tel-Aviv and Aston Villa.
Make of that what you will...
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