Klopp Farewell Tour off to decent start as returning stars highlight the obvious potential for his successor
A routine FA Cup win over Championship stragglers Norwich probably isn’t the biggest or most surprising news to emerge from Anfield this week.
The first game of what is now a lengthy Jurgen Klopp Farewell Tour was always going to be a bit hard to gauge. The facton-pitch victory was a near certainty in fact only added to the air of uncertainty about the general mood. Would it be celebratory or funereal? Would it be a strangely subdued one no matter how many goals rained down?
What it was, in the end, was pretty typical cup-tie Anfield fare. The general lack of tension in the game meant it was never going to be a truly crackling atmosphere, but the fans had come to celebrate after the difficulty of coming to terms with Friday’s shock news. Fair to say today’s news was rather better, not just in the performance and result in this 5-2 win but in a very acceptable fifth-round draw at home to Watford or Southampton.
The potential for Klopp’s drawn-out departure from Anfield to end in a significant haul of silverware grows ever stronger. Far tougher tests await in all those trophy tilts, of course, but this was also an afternoon that highlighted why Klopp felt comfortable making the decision he has now, rather than during the tougher days of last season when his reluctance to depart owed much to a desire to leave the club in as healthy a state as possible.
On that score, today was a huge vindication. As well as an entertaining victory to keep the four-pronged trophy pursuit ticking, there was evidence to be found all over the pitch of how Klopp’s influence has transformed this club and will continue to have an impact long after he’s gone.
Nineteen-year-old James McConnell got the assist for the opening goal, scored by the not exactly ancient Curtis Jones. Conor Bradley, who is really making a name for himself as a potentially Trent Alexander-Arnold-liberating right-back at the moment, picked up another pair of assists for a growing collection.
But for a real sign of the long-term health of Klopp’s Liverpool, you wanted to be looking at the second-half substitutes. Virgil van Dijk. Andy Robertson. Alexander-Arnold. Dominik Szoboszlai. The Premier League leaders are going to miss Klopp, and they’ll have a devil of a job replacing him, but there really is no reason they shouldn’t continue to flourish and develop in the post-Klopp years to come. Everything is still there.
As for the game itself, it could hardly have been better for Liverpool, who found themselves up against an up-and-down Norwich side led by Klopp’s great mate David Wagner and determined to make their own tribute to the Liverpool manager by playing the game the way he would always want it played.
Norwich deserve a fair bit of credit, really, for their part in making the game a spectacle. Their determination to play their way out of defence often appeared wildly optimistic but was never dull, while more unproblematically impressive was their willingness and capability to attack with verve and numbers on the rare occasions it was possible. They managed what Arsenal couldn’t in round three in finding a couple of ways through the Liverpool defence even if an upset and what would have been an undeniably and enormously funny pooping of the party never really appeared any kind of meaningful possibility.
Canaries fans will instead have to make do with taking their FA Cup hilarity for the weekend from events in Ipswich yesterday. We suspect they’ll cope.
Today was always likely to be about one particular team with a German manager, though. There is uncertainty around this club now, and it’s always disconcerting and unmooring when that happens at a club of this size and the impending departure of a manager of Klopp’s outsized brilliance and personality.
Premier League history is against his successor given the only remotely comparable situations are those faced by Manchester United after Ferguson and Arsenal under Wenger. But while the on-pitch action was only one part of today’s story it was another small reminder that Klopp will be leaving behind far healthier foundations than David Moyes or Unai Emery found.
