Liverpool supporters are already reflecting on the Jurgen Klopp era with four games of The Farewell Tour left, while rival fans are explaining their hatred.
Send your thoughts to theeditor@football365.com.
Worried for Liverpool
I’m really worried for Liverpool. Once the saintly Klopp has gone, who will be able to lift a side where there is so little money to spend (net spend champions remember, where will the funds come from?)?
Seriously though, it’s going to take quite some manager to come in and fix the issues that apparently exist, replace the past it players or those not good enough, on a shoe string budget.
Dutch managers are pretty good at it by all accounts, I can’t wait to see how it plays out.
Badwolf
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Maybe the real treasure was the friends we made along the way
Wow, I was more disappointed with the first mailbox after the Liverpool game than the game itself.
We have had a great run this season and a great time under Klopp. Pre-Klopp, we had sporadic success, with no consistency and certainly not a consistent contender.
Let’s not forget that before FSG the club was a complete shambles. . I still shiver at the thought of the Hicks and Gillette era. And after they got their sea legs, they brought in Klopp. What a fantastic decision that was.
Under Klopp, we could all see what he was trying to achieve – pulling the club forward in every single area. For those laughing and saying he isn’t really leaving the next manager a decent squad – remember that it’s more than the squad. He’s leaving them with a state-of-the-art training facility, a better academy – and an academy in sync with the first team to allow the younger players to come through and play a part. Imagine you are one of the young tykes – disappointed not to get a longer run under Klopp but hearing they are looking at a manager who works well with younger players.
That is all good for the long-term viability of the club. Liverpool can’t survive on big-name signings – can’t compete consistently on big-name signings – in fact, clubs, in general, can’t and shouldn’t be trying to compete on that level as it generally doesn’t end well.
We have been involved in every competition this season, and we had a great ride. The immense joy at those late wins. Many games were bonkers. Perhaps we did run out of steam, didn’t handle the post mass injuries well, players a bit off form, not playing cohesively, which happens when you are going from game to game to game.
But if you were to add the total joy from all those games versus the clear disappointment from Wednesday evening, we’re still way ahead. Way ahead of almost 95+% of the other teams.
Sure ,there will now be a media frenzy over who will stay and who will go – they have to fill pages. We now have a decent management and recruitment team in place are well positioned to make good decisions to take the team forward.
Everyone wrote off Liverpool before this season – a transition season. Well, for a transition, that was great.
Klopp’s legacy won’t be just the trophies or the squad he leaves behind or the sheer ecstasy of winning and seeing the Klopp fist bumps, but the fact he helped rebuild the club, make it force again, and a consistent contender going forward.
Paul McDevitt
Danke, Jurgen
Having slept on it and read the glee from rivals in yesterday morning’s mailbox it makes me laugh when the criticism comes from Chelsea fans who Jurgen Klopp and Liverpool defeated in their last three cup finals; from United supporters who watched Klopp’s team tear their side apart 7-0 not long ago (the worst loss in all our lifetimes since the 7-4 and 7-1 Kop victories in 1908 and 1895) and from Spurs fans who have seen Klopp win as much in the last two months as their club has won in 33 years and whose own personalroad to success always seems to be under construction.
As Mark Twain once said: “One man alone can be pretty dumb but for real bona fide stupidity there ain’t nothing can beat teamwork.” And boy do some rivals show this with their baffling and quite pathetic obsession with an old advertising slogan which the fans and players had no input or say in. I assume they fall back on this old chestnut because they havea smaller vocabulary than an upturned calculator and can’t think of anything else.
The reality is Klopp achieved something miraculous in winning a Premier League title against a state-run financially-doped cheating-machine. Jose Mourinho didn’t manage it, nor did Carlo Ancelotti, Mikel Arteta (yet),Unai Emery, Thomas Tuchel, Mauricio Pochettino, Louis van Gaal, Ange Postecoglou and almost 100 other managers since 2017/18 whenCity started to reap the rewards of their over-spending.
Sadly for the great Germanonce you’re over the hill you begin to pick up speed but I will forever be grateful to him for the memories that no rival can take away, which is what I suspect annoys them so much. ‘Corner taken quickly . . . Origiiiiiiii!’, ‘Silverware is the currency of success in football and Liverpool have just hit the Champions League jackpot’ and‘Bobby Firmino makes it SEVEN’being my personal Top 3.
Danke, Jurgen, for everything.
Jo (If I was a bird I know who I’d poop on.) Kent
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Typical Liverpool fan
I was just reading the mailbox, & Liverpool fan “Nik, Paris” so typifies what is wrong with Liverpool fans.
He states Liverpool have made mistakes that have cost them, but opposition teams haven’t. He cites the FA cup game against United as an example: “Nunez against United in the Cup. But I do not recall an opposition mistake in recent months”, while conveniently forgetting in the very same game, Liverpool’s 2ndgoal was a mistake by Fernandez, who gifted the ball to Gomez to cross to Nunez to shoot, & Salah to tap in!?! This is so typical of Liverpool fans, they’re so myopic, so biased.
Not to mention their other 2 goals in that game were deflections, the 3rdgoal quite a wicked deflection.
He further states: “Against United in the FA Cup, we should’ve been out of sight. Losing that was ridiculous”. That is exactly what I pointed out in my last email: opposition never get any credit.
Let’s examine the FA cup game: United battered Liverpool for 35 mins, scored a goal, but should’ve scored 2-3. Then Pool score a deflected McAllister goal out of nothing, score a 2nd(the aforementioned mistake by Bruno) & somehow go in 2-1 up at half time. They proceed to dominate possession for the next 35 mins, in which Onana makes the sum total of ZERO saves! When Arsenal did this under Wenger, it was called “Sterile Possession”, but when Pool do it, it’s applauded by their fans & sycophantic media.
United score around the 80thminute, & from then on, until the end of extra time, are the FAR superior team.
They win despite Elliot scoring a fluke of a 3rdgoal, & going 2-3 down. So, Pool are the better team for 45 of 120 minutes (the last 10 mins of 1sthalf, & 35 minutes of 2ndhalf), United are the far better team for 75 minutes. Their XG is better at half time, full time, 1sthalf of extra time, & after 120 minutes. They score 4 good goals, to Pool’s 2 deflected goal!
Yet somehow, “Pool should’ve been out of sight. Losing that was ridiculous” !?!
Media reports of the game were the same, all about how Pool should’ve won easily!Our entire football media has been taken over by ex-Liverpool players, & Liverpool fans. That’s another reason why 99.99% of other fans hate Liverpool. Reporting of their matches are so biased, any neutral fan would turn against them.
So next time you wonder why no one likes you, think about how entitled & biased you all are.
Finally, it’s so fitting that Klopp is leaving with only the Micky Mouse cup! Somehow it’s even more fitting than if he hadn’t won anything at all!?!
Fred (“Give other teams some credit”), London
Happy camp at Palace
Dear Football365,
Safe to say I’ve had a better 24 hours than a nameless Liverpool supporter who, upon discovering the result when he awoke this morning, threw his phone on the ground in frustration. 28 years old he is ah.
*Maybe it’s an April thing. Before last night, the last time Crystal Palace won three games in a row was April 2023 immediately after Roy Hodgson returned to the club. Win at Craven Cottage on Saturday and it’ll be four wins in a row for the first time since February to June 2020. They haven’t done five in a row since April 2014.
*While this isn’t quite the same new manager bounce (it was a slower burn) than last season, things are now definitely clicking under Oliver Glasner. Against Newcastle United it was a complete performance and could, in future, have a significance beyond the three points collected at full time.
It was a fine example of how his system should work and indeed does work to produce an attractive style of attacking football built on a solid defensive foundation. It really helps with recruitment if players are already open to coming to play for you.
*Despite only being here for a few games, Glasner has largely won over the fanbase with his approach. He inherited a squad accustomed to playing a certain way and taught them a completely new system, despite not having ever had his strongest starting XI available to him. Cheick Doucoure has missed half the season, Marc Guehi and Jefferson Lerma are not due fully back for a few weeks, and Matheus Franca is still out indefinitely, while Eberechi Eze and Michael Olise were injured when Glasner arrived. However, instead of complaining about the squad he inherited, he has taught the players at his disposal how he wants them to play. It’s just a refreshing difference from managers at all levels of the English game (and almost always British) who take on a job and then insist on spending heaps of money improving a squad or complain about not being able to bring new players in.
*The two players who have benefitted the most from Glasner’s arrival seem to be Nathaniel Clyne, because he’s playing regularly (and adapting well to a new role) and Jean-Philippe Mateta, who is scoring regularly. It definitely helps that Palace are starting their attacks higher up the pitch now, he’s significantly less isolated and more of the attacking play is about feeding him in a variety of ways, but he’s playing his part. Match of the Day showed him holding off three opponents at once and keeping possession, but at another moment he tracked back 60 yards in order to win the ball and set off another attack. It’s just great to see him repaying his teammates with industry for the greater significance he’s been given.
*It’s always good to beat an Eddie Howe team. He looks like a trainee PE teacher, or a fitness instructor who does the beginners’ spin class at your local municipal leisure centre, but his teams are snide and, in the absence of Watford from the Premier League, the quickest to resort to cynical niggly fouls. Howe is also a frequent deployer of “we did enough to get something from the game”, although that was not the case here. He did, however, overstate the penalty incident involving Sean Longstaff and Will Hughes, which had very little in it. Longstaff’s tumble looked very embellished, a term I use deliberately as it’s from ice hockey: an opponent might get a two minute penalty for hooking you, but if you make a meal of it you will get two minutes for embellishment; of all Premier League footballers, Longstaff is best placed to understand this.
*Because we’re not allowed nice things, it seems like every day there’s another footballer from the 1990s trotted out by the media to say that big clubs should use their lustre to attract Palace’s star players away. The other day it was Dwight Yorke, whose pivot into stand-up comedy had completely passed me by, suggesting Manchester United could prise Eze and Olise away for a grand total of £80m, an amount likely to be below the asking price of at least one of them, when you factor in the cost of replacing one or both. Sidebar: though acting as a voice of Manchester United in the media, Yorke actually played for five English clubs and made more than half of his appearances for Aston Villa.
Today, it was the turn of John Barnes to say that Liverpool should raid Palace for several of their best players. I know he used to manage Celtic but you can’t respond to unexpectedly losing games by simply signing the other team’s best players, English football just doesn’t work like that.
*A quick word on Liverpool. The announcement of Jurgen Klopp’s departure came as such a surprise because morale at the club was good, meaning no disgruntled players were leaking stories to the media, the way they are at Manchester United or Chelsea. However, Liverpool’s downturn in form arriving at the same time as speculation about the next manager really taking off cannot be a coincidence.
Ed Quoththeraven
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Now all the gnashing and shouting and acceptance and realisation of the situation where by the 2 teams tipped at the start of the season to be the top 2 teams at the end of the season has now occurred, can we please not forget the hitherto unrealised statistic and for a while (before the last 3 games anyway) a worry, that Palace would cause the end of the world, butterfly wing flap chaos theory event by not getting the 40something points that they absolute get every season..With 39pts and 4 games to play and how well they are doing… my real concern is that they go on to get 50+ points!
I cant remember the writer but someone on your team was very concerned they might not make it.. They then beat Pool (thanks to whoever wrote that by the way..), smashed West Ham and beat Newcastle who they ‘never beat’ allegedly.
So the world is safe.
Thanks Oliver Glasner for saving us all. (and to Ed QTR for not writing a 15 page epic about it)
Al – LFC – Resigned since we drew with Manutd to be honest. Just a bit dulled emotionally to last nights joke result.
A response to Rob
I assume Rob, the Crystal Palace fan, turned his heating off this winter so as not to be seen supporting Putin and his tyranny. Rob is a highly educated and clearly principle-driven individual you see, that is above the rest of us mere mortals, and wouldn’t touch Russian gas with a bargepole.
As a Newcastle fan I do expect this kind of outside view of our club now that we’re owned by the Saudi regime. Do I support Saudi’s views on women, hom*osexuality, or agree with their human rights record? Of course not. But then again, I don’t live in their country, so who am I to tell them what to do?
Where does this leave me? I’m presuming Rob would up sticks and stop supporting Palace as soon as investment came in from the Middle East (and it could just happen someday…).
I read the term ‘sportswashing’ and sighed at its inevitability. Let me tell you something, Saudi doesn’t give a stuff what you, I, or anyone in this country thinks of it. It’s not trying to change our minds about it at all, why would it? They don’t believe they’re doing wrong otherwise they’d change their ways.
Saudi are buying up sport, isn’t this obvious? They want in on the action. They want the money, glory, success and global recognition, not because they want to brainwash Rob in Croydon (we know they’ve no chance of this anyway) but because they’re ambitious people with more wealth than they actually know what to do with.
It’s this sort of one-eyed view which laughably aims the blame at Newcastle fans – we “sold our soul to the devil” you see. But we didn’t sell anything, did we? Mike Ashley sold the football club that I have supported all my life. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a say when he bought it and I didn’t have a say when he sold it either. I don’t make those calls, none of us do. If you’ve got an issue, take it up with Mr Ashley for selling, or the Premier League for allowing the Saudis and their money into our league. Both of those things happened within the rules and laws of this country and the PL competition.
I don’t support Saudi, but I won’t stop supporting Newcastle for you or anyone else, Rob. Hope you don’t lose sleep over this but be aware you’re living in a country that traded £17.4bn worth of goods and services with Saudi last year. (This is where we find out Rob actually lives on a desert island with no history of human rights abuses).
Anyway well done on Wednesday, Palace thoroughly deserved the win. Try and be happy about that and I’ll try and be happy supporting my team as well.
Simon, NUFC
