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glb

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I want the same celebration when we next beat United or the Bitters.

Raphael Honigstein piece in the Grauniad about Klopp: http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2015/oct/06/jurgen-klopp-anfield-liverpool-borussia-dortmund

Spoilered for long.

What will Jürgen Klopp make of his description as “the love child of Jeremy Corbyn” by one UK paper this week? It’s hard to contemplate. Klopp being Klopp, however, he may just play along with the joke and cheekily rehash an old speech for his inaugural address as the new Reds leader, scheduled for some time at the end of next week.

The script still fits, after all. At his unveiling at Borussia Dortmund in May 2008, the Swabian vowed to get the fallen, financially hemmed-in Bundesliga giants “back into the groove”, to improve the players by making them “reach higher” and get a mid-table team low on cohesion and excitement to “play once more the kind of football the people here want to see”.

His then revolutionary tactics of high, concerted pressing all over the pitch turned Dortmund into title winners and one of Europe’s most admired sides in the space of two seasons. The wealth and sheer number of clubs ahead of Liverpool in the Premier League table will make a repeat of such thrilling success much more difficult in England, where players are also not used to doing double shifts in training and no one has, of yet, found a sustainable way to get a team to run this much, this often, without a winter break, throughout a campaign.

But Klopp’s likely appointment at Liverpool feels so instinctively right because the 48-year-old’s extra-large personality will immediately cut through much of the befuddled silence that has befallen Anfield since the club almost won the championship in 2014 and ensure the volume is from now on turned all the way up.

His Dortmund side fed off the electricity and noise of the Signal Iduna Park, a 81,359 volt boom box that blasts out a passable version of You’ll Never Walk Alone before each game.

“I like the total intensification [that happens in a game], when there are crashes and bangs everywhere, a sense of ‘all of nothing’, pure adrenaline and no one being able to breathe,” Klopp told Die Zeit in 2012. His ability to talk a good game has been a key component of his progress since taking over as player‑manager for perennial nobodies Mainz in 2001.

Jan Doehling, a producer at the Mainz-based state television channel ZDF, had seen Klopp captivate audiences with passionate speeches at end‑of‑season parties in the town square: “He brought tears to everyone’s eyes and had mothers holding up their babies, yelling that they would name them after him,” Doehling recalls, with only a hint of exaggeration.

Klopp was picked as the main pundit for the 2005 Confederations Cup in Germany, despite having never won a significant trophy as player or manager. He was a revelation, pointing out tactical details on screen “in an entertaining, funny, sexy manner”. Crucially, he made sure to use self-deprecating humour, to avoid patronising the audience. He spoke to them like a friend in a pub, without airs and graces.

While Jürgen Klinsmann’s team enthralled the public at the 2006 World Cup, Klopp joyfully played the role of the country’s TV national manager, winning plaudits for his insight. “We realised that this guy knows how to put his point across and to mesmerise people,” Doehling says. “If he had started a political party, they would have voted him into government immediately.”

Menschenfänger, they call guys like him in Germany, someone who can literally catch people and talk them into doing things they themselves did not feel possible.

Players never went through the proverbial brick wall for him, however, instead they trusted him to show them the quickest way around it. The overall aim is to get their “synapses to glow”, through constant learning and improvement, he once explained, revealing he hired a Life Kinetik coach to teach them peripheral vision.

In some quarters Klopp has been wrongly described as merely a strong motivator. While it’s fair to say he has relied on the expertise of his assistant coaches Peter Krawitz and Zeljko Buvac to underpin the effort exerted by the players in his brand of “hunting football”, Klopp’s ability to get complicated points across in a clear, uplifting manner has been key. The relatively young squad at Liverpool, coupled with the fact they are low on trophy winners, should make it easier for him to install his regime.

Things started to go sour at BVB after his historic double of 2012, before Bayern snatched away two important players, Mario Götze and Robert Lewandowski. As injuries piled up, doubts over Klopp’s fitness regime surfaced while opposing teams started to copy his tactics.

Klopp’s all-or-nothing approach continued to thrill, all the way down to the bottom of the table last season and then up again to a respectable seventh place but the relationship had run its course. There are only so many rousing speeches you can deliver before a team become deaf. It has been telling that virtually the same side are back to their spell-binding best under the guidance of Thomas Tuchel, who has slowed down things to make their style more sustainable.

At Liverpool, though, fans and boardroom crave the raw thrill of what Klopp has called Englischer Fussball, a 100mph tour de force with guaranteed action in the box. In Klopp, the Anglophile football romantic, they will bring in a prophet with a loudspeaker who is himself one of the converted.

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glb

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Corrected the article because first two paragraphs were missing.

It is an interesting read, Klopp certainly has charisma. Not that a media darling is what we need, but press approval can go a long way to giving a manager leeway. More importantly, a manager fans can relate to does inspire a certain bond between supporters and the club, which then has a positive effect on the pitch.

Obviously his style of play will be the most important factor, and as the article suggests high pressing will be tough to maintain without a winter break (plus Villas Boas' version didn't do much for Spurs) but his recent break from the game, however short, may have given him a fresh perspective to his approach.

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dogsout

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The way Rafa's teams have pressed is quite different to Klopp's counter-pressing. Rafa's pressing style was modelled on Arrigo Sacchi's principles of pressing. Klopp's style is like a hybrid. The main difference being the first trigger for gegenpressing is actually the loss of possession in an attacking phase. Where most teams that press would fall into a shape to press from, Klopp's teams push out and press immediately upon losing the ball, only relenting and dropping into a containing shape if the press is beaten. Traditional pressing systems are based on pressing zonally (think Sacchi, Benitez, Bielsa, Guardiola), gegenpressing is man-to-man in certain phases, and every man within distance to the ball in its first phases. It's maybe more simplistic but also more organic and unpredictable making it hard to account or plan for.

He is on record as saying he could only do it with Dortmund due to the winter break, so maybe he'll have to modify it for us.

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glb

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The way Rafa's teams have pressed is quite different to Klopp's counter-pressing. Rafa's pressing style was modelled on Arrigo Sacchi's principles of pressing. Klopp's style is like a hybrid. The main difference being the first trigger for gegenpressing is actually the loss of possession in an attacking phase. Where most teams that press would fall into a shape to press from, Klopp's teams push out and press immediately upon losing the ball, only relenting and dropping into a containing shape if the press is beaten. Traditional pressing systems are based on pressing zonally (think Sacchi, Benitez, Bielsa, Guardiola), gegenpressing is man-to-man in certain phases, and every man within distance to the ball in its first phases. It's maybe more simplistic but also more organic and unpredictable making it hard to account or plan for.

He is on record as saying he could only do it with Dortmund due to the winter break, so maybe he'll have to modify it for us.

Dogsout, please post every day. Love reading these and getting more of an understanding of the complexities of football tactics, and with it a greater appreciation of the sport.

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