Jurgen Klopp handed ‘moral victory’ in ‘best 1-1 draw you will ever witness’

The hyperbole has been turned up to 11 after a pretty good Liverpool-Man City game that has become an ‘instant classic’ as any Liverpool failures are forgotten.

Now that’s what I call the best 1-1 draw ever
Sometimes, Mediawatch simply has to highlight a man getting very, very carried away. So here’s Oliver Holt in the Daily Mail:

When people talk about the many times that Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola faced each other in English league football, they will talk about the last meeting most rapturously of all. They will talk about a squally day on Merseyside, with a bitterly cold wind blowing in off the River Mersey and they will say that this was their masterpiece.

Sorry but will they balls. They will talk about the 2-1 win from City and the John Stones clearance that helped haul back Liverpool in January 2019. Or the phenomenal 2-2 draw later that same year. Or the absolute 4-3 humdinger in January 2018. They won’t talk about a 1-1 draw in March 2024 that left Arsenal top of the Premier League table.

It was an epic. It was an instant classic. It was a game that finished 1-1 but could have been 5-5.

Somebody tell him the xG score was 2.5-1.6. It was a very good game but an ‘instant classic’? The MailOnline football homepage has already moved on to some confected nonsense about Rasmus Hojlund.

It was order against chaos. It was relentless. It was breathless. It was chance after chance after chance. It was the imperiousness of Virgil van Dijk. It was the beauty of Kevin de Bruyne’s passing. It was the irrepressibility of Darwin Nunez. It was the composure of Rodri. It had everything.

Anybody get the impression that Holt might have written this before kick-off of a game in which De Bruyne’s passing was off and Rodri actually struggled for composure, coming off second best to Wataru Endo?

The best 1-1 draw you will ever witness left Arsenal top of the Premier League with ten games to go but as Klopp wrapped Guardiola in a hug at the final whistle and the two men smiled at the spectacle they had just witnessed, the spectacle they had created, we smiled with them.

‘The best 1-1 draw you will ever witness’? Ever? That feels like A Lot.

‘Whatever the result,’ Klopp had said before the match, ‘I don’t think anybody should open the bottles of champagne.’

The result vindicated him. Let’s leave the champagne for those who were fortunate enough to have seen what we saw on Sunday and hold it as a cherished memory.

Yes, let’s all toast watching a 1-1 draw. Because that’s not f***ing weird.

READ: 16 Conclusions on Liverpool 1 Manchester City 1

Football so good that even women like it…
Over to Oliver Kay of The Athletic for some everyday sexism…

Jurgen Klopp summed it up perfectly: “What a game, what an atmosphere, what an afternoon.”

Even his wife enjoyed it. “She was completely buzzing,” the Liverpool manager said — and just about everyone inside Anfield must have felt the same.

Even his wife enjoyed it. And she’s a girl!

Coast to coast
Mediawatch agrees with a great deal of the noise about the brilliance of Klopp and the rivalry he has enjoyed with Pep Guardiola but Martin Samuel in The Times – while heralding a ‘moral victory’ for the German – writes:

Who else could have resisted City for as long as he has done, brought them down to earth so frequently, kept them honest, to borrow a term from Australian cricket. City have never been allowed to coast, never had it all their way. Yes, the Treble. Yes, five title wins in six. Yet how many should City have won with this team, and with Guardiola as their mentor? That would be all six.

Pesky fact: Liverpool finished last season 22 points behind Manchester City. Two years before the gap was 17 points.

Let’s not pretend that this City team has ‘never been allowed to coast, never had it all their way’. It was Arsenal who did not allow them to coast last season, and no f***er at all stepped up in 2020/21.

‘Klopp must wonder what he has to do to make them fold. The degrees by which he has elevated them are all there in the numbers: Liverpool finished their campaign in 2019 with 97 points, and 92 three years later. Both times City surpassed them on the final day’, writes Oliver Brown in the Daily Telegraph.

Odd how he has missed out the 69 and the 67-point seasons. That’s all there in the numbers too.

Puzzle corner
Back to the Daily Mail and Ian Ladyman now…

Whatever happens between now and the season’s end – whoever wins this year’s Premier League – Guardiola will watch Klopp walk away knowing that he never quite managed to solve the puzzle.

Guardiola has more league titles to his name and as such can lay claim to having dominated the English top flight in a way nobody previously had in the modern age. Still, though, he has never managed to find the solution to the deep and complex challenges presented to him by Klopp’s Liverpool teams.

He’s done okay though, right? He’s lost only one of their last nine Premier League meetings. And he’s still managed to win five of the last six Premier League titles. It’s almost like he didn’t need to ‘solve the puzzle’, just consistently win more football matches.

Agree to well, agree
As tempting as it is to join the pile-on of Mike Dean after he was bodied in a drive-by from Jurgen Klopp, the Sky Sports pundit had a completely balanced view of the Jeremy Doku stud-plant into the chest of Alexis Mac Allister. He clearly thought it was a penalty, saying:

“I think he’s touched the ball Doku, but with the follow-through he’s caught him right in the chest. I think it could be a penalty. It’s a massive decision by the VAR. Tiny touch on the ball, but the follow through has caught him on the ribcage.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Stuart sent him to the screen. Check’s complete. Obviously played the ball first and the follow through same as I’m guessing a normal coming-together. He’s very, very fortunate in my opinion there Doku.”

So, Doku was “very, very fortunate”, making it obvious that Dean would have given Liverpool the penalty, or sent the referee to the screen if he was the VAR.

But that’s no fun, is it? So when Gladiators referee and hype man Mark Clattenburg writes in his Daily Mail column that it should have been a penalty, this is where the Mirror goes:

Mark Clattenburg disagrees with Mike Dean and slams VAR after Liverpool denied penalty

Not true though, is it? What actually happened is that one referee agreed with another. Which is a pretty shit headline, but would at least be accurate.

And the Mirror are more than happy to play both sides, with another headline on their site reading ‘Why Liverpool didn’t get penalty vs Man City comes to light – but Mike Dean’s not convinced’.

So he either thought it was a penalty or thought it wasn’t a penalty, and that depends entirely on who you want him to disagree with.

Et tu, brutal?
Mediawatch is not saying that words have lost all meaning but this is from The Sun…

Jurgen Klopp calls out Gareth Southgate with brutal message on live TV after Liverpool held by Man City

This ‘brutal message’?

“Joe Gomez. Gareth, honestly??!”

Shots fired. How will Southgate survive that absolute beasting?

Gomez has just 11 England caps to his name, the last of which came in October 2020, despite being an ever-present for Liverpool since Klopp took charge.

‘Ever-present’? He started 15 Premier League games last season.