Tommy Martin: Just when Klopp was losing his grip, along came Caoimhín Kelleher for a hug
Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp and goalkeeper Caoimhin Kelleher after during the Champions League match at Anfield. Picture: Jon Super
Jurgen Klopp needs a hug. Like Frank Sinatra with a cold in the old Gay Talese story, Klopp without hugs is “Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel — only worse.”
So when his young Irish goalkeeper makes his Champions League debut and keeps a clean sheet with a clutch of Hollywood saves and the team are into the last 16 after a week when he’s been in a huff at the world and feeling maybe he’s losing his grip on things a bit… man, that guy is getting a hug.
Caoimhín Kelleher strolls out of his goalmouth, playing it cool, no big deal. So what? I’m a 22-year-old from Cork, what else would I be doing?
He sees his manager approach, beaming, and, in keeping with the times, lifts a gloved hand for an appreciative fist-bump. Klopp dispenses with the protocols and charges playfully into the object of his affections with a sort of one-armed, side-on shove, like the world’s friendliest rugby maul.
Kelleher is slapping him on the back now, thanking him for his faith. The camera stays on the young Irishman, blond and cool and lanky like a non-speaking extra from Summer Bay Surf Club.
But Klopp is off. He’s hugging. There’s one for Neco Williams, the right-back, like Kelleher another youngster filling in for one of the team’s injured key struts.
And for Sadio Mané, wearing a t-shirt in tribute to one of this heroes, Papa Bouba Diop, the Senegalese legend who died a few days ago.
Each hug is deeper and longer than the last, society’s new conventions forgotten with each intoxicating gulp of human contact.
Three days earlier, a different scene. Klopp stood in an empty stadium on the south coast of England arguing with a man holding a microphone. Klopp raged at the man about the broadcasters whose schedules force his team to stumble from late-night Champions League assignments into bowls of pasta at dawn.
The man with the microphone pointed out that the power to resolve the cruel lash of the TV listings lies with Klopp’s own paymasters. The interview was a pitchside proxy war on behalf of the men’s respective bosses; a short, one-act play whose theme was the suffocating entanglement of football and television money.
The sources of Klopp’s current ire are manifold. The fixture schedule, his injury list, VAR.
Even Chris Wilder, the Sheffield United manager cast as Henry Fonda in for his stubborn refusal to okay the use of five substitutes.
Wilder may be one of those people in football who reckon they can see through Klopp and his free-love guru act. That the mask slips often enough to show he’s just like the rest of them: Selfish, ruthless, single-minded.
Frank Lampard rounded on him on the touchline a few months ago, amid shouting and roaring about some decision or other. “You can f*** off and all,” Lampard shouted. “Only title you’ve ever won and you think you can give it the big one, f*** off.”
Now here he is again. A few things have gone against him — decisions, injuries, the usual — and the fixtures are unkind but here he is, snarling at a man doing his job with a microphone.
Giving it the big one.
But really, Jurgen Klopp needs a hug.
After all, there can be few on the planet more discommoded by the requirements of social distancing. This is a man who was known in Germany as ‘Der Menschenfänger’ — literally, The Man-Catcher.
Of course, he can still hug these days. In theory, anyone in Liverpool’s bubble, tested and incessantly re-tested, is fair game.
But it’s a cold climate for huggers, especially the ones Klopp likes. The big bearish squeezes of a father greeting a long-lost son. The enveloping love-basket for the player who’s had a bad game, head shoved into the sanctuary of the Klopp armpit, where everything will be okay. In moments of jubilation, a bone-shaking rattle accompanied by a sort of reverse Heimlich squeeze-and-hop.
It was the thing people noticed when he came to the Premier League. Adam Lallana got one after Klopp’s first game, a 0-0 draw against Tottenham. If Klopp was going to be about heavy metal football, people feared for Lallana, a winsome folkie of a player. But he ran his legs off that day, doing his manager’s bidding. There was a hug in it for him and, five years later, a league medal too.
For Klopp, the hug is the simple way to acknowledge all the hard things he asks the players to do.
"I'm really demanding to be honest, and I really want a lot of them,” he said when asked about his Anfield hugocracy. “When you can really see how they fight, with the last drop of fuel in their machine ... that's the most easy thing to do (hug them)."
But hugs these days are stilted things, like the embarrassing bro-grab shunt you give your boss at the end of a company team-building day. It’s just not the done thing, and you certainly mustn’t linger.
The plight of the hug is symbolic of Klopp’s greater mood. He can’t ask his players to play at the normal high-octane full-throttle because of the crazy fixture schedule. And they keep getting injured anyway.
He can’t draw on the electrical current of the crowd to energise them either, nor can he rally the Anfield spirits with those shamanic touchline rain-dances. He feels like everyone in football is acting in self-interest and not with the sense of communal good that he likes to think should govern people’s decisions.
His team are doing fine, digging out results, but it is not the swelling tide of joy and emotion that carried them to glory and he feels like Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel. It brings out the worst in him.
And then this big Irish goalkeeper kid with the funny name comes into the team and plays like that?
Really, there’s only one thing for it.
