Ranking the top six lines from the Luis Diaz VAR audio, which is still even funnier than Klopp
Jurgen Klopp has done a madness and said out loud that he thinks the very funny Spurs-Liverpool game should be replayed. Maybe he’s right, if it promises to be as funny as the first one. But also, he’s definitely wrong because of course he is.
Still, asking for a replay after everyone spent three days going ‘Nobody with a brain is asking for a replay’ is a good bit from Klopp and you have to respect that. It was a funny thing for him to say, and it’s also funny to now watch assorted Liverpool Sensibles (and, er, Mediawatch), having been entirely stitched up by the manager, contort themselves into impossible shapes to make what they’ve spent three days saying marry up with what Klopp is now saying.
He doesn’t actually want a replay! He’s just keeping the pressure on the PGMOL by having everyone point and laugh at him! It’s a 4D chess move! He’s got everyone on strings!
These people are now at a point where if Klopp suggested changing the name of Twitter to X and taking headlines off links, they would feel obliged to point out what a masterful strategy this was and how clever it was of him to keep Twitter/X in the news like that.
All great fun. But while it means the events of the previous day have slightly been overtaken we still feel it’s important not to lose sight of what is still the funniest part of all this: The Audio.
Klopp asking for a replay was funny. The reaction to it was funny. But we must also consider here the long-term implications. He has ensured his replay comment will be brought up in whimsical fashion on a thrice-daily basis for the rest of the season and beyond. And it will not remain funny for long. It will not even do the Stewart Lee thing where it stops being funny for awhile and then starts being funny again until it’s even funnier than it was initially. No. This will not be Sideshow Bob stepping on rakes.
Think of what he’s just unleashed. Think of what will happen every time there’s a VAR decision in any game for the rest of time. Especially think of what will happen the next time there’s a VAR decision that favours Liverpool. Think of a manager in a press conference making a weak ‘perhaps we’ll ask for a replay’ gag and the journos guffawing and wiping the tears from their eyes for a full calendar month. Think of the next time Klopp himself wants to do one of his (sometimes valid, to be fair) rants about fixture congestion. Think of all the banter. Awful.
But The Audio? We’ll admit to thinking that the hype around The Audio meant it was doomed, and couldn’t possibly live up to the expectation. There was just no way it could be as good as people wanted it to be.
We were wrong. It was better.
Not for those people who apparently seemed to believe it might have Darren England going “Yeah, obviously it’s a goal but f*** the Scousers” or similar. But for those of us who knew it would just be the sound of people f***ing things up horribly in real time, it’s extraordinary. Memes for days. And the good thing about memes is that they never get boring. And The Audio contains just so, so many of them.
You can go two ways with it, frankly. The fact it contains meme density that not even The Thick of It or Partridge could match at their peak, and excruciating comedy to rival the very best of The Office either makes you realise it is too absurd not to be real or you can be red-pilled into thinking that actually it is so perfect it has to be fake and they’ve got Armando Iannucci in to script it and throw everyone off the ‘Liverpool being Liverpool’ scent.
Hang on. Maybe that’s why Klopp came out and talked about replays? Oh now we see it. It truly is 4D chess. Masterful stuff. Methinks you win the internet for today, good sir.
Anyway. Here’s the top six memes from The Audio, ranked.
6) ‘I can’t do anything, I can’t do anything. [Expletive]’
What’s great about The Audio, apart from its obvious inherent memeability, is that it might also be the single most relatable piece of content in all of history. Who among us can honestly say we’ve never in our lives been Darren England in that awful, horrible moment of realisation when we’ve only been half-concentrating on something and then had our heart leave our body via the anus as we realise with unimaginable horror that we’ve only gone and hit ‘Reply All’.
5) ‘Are you happy with this?’
And while we’ve definitely all been Darren England, let’s not be too hard on ourselves here. Because at some point in our working lives every one of us has also been the hero of this sorry story: Replay Operator. The only person in the room with our head on, doing our job properly and thus horrifyingly aware at all times that senior colleagues are about to do something disastrous, but there being nothing we can do about it because we’re too junior to directly call it out. So we have to rely instead on desperately asking “Are you happy with this?” in the forlorn hope they might work it out for themselves. Or at the very, very least to provide ourselves with cover when the sh*t starts inevitably hitting the fan at enormous velocity. “I asked if he was happy with it, mate.”
4) ‘That’s wrong that, Daz.’
When your whites aren’t brilliant white even at 30 degrees.
3) ‘Offside. Goal. Yeah.’
Ridiculous to suggest VAR needs clearer communication protocols when messages from the assistant VAR are being delivered with this sense of calm authority and clarity. Offside, goal, yeah. If you still don’t understand what’s happening after that crystal clear messaging then we can’t help you. What’s good about this is that it also looks a bit like one of those three-word slogans the government liked using during covid, doesn’t it? That’ll meme up real nice if you put it on a lectern with any gormless-looking Tory politician chatting some absolute horrific sh*t behind it.
2) ‘Oh [expletive]’
Again, just enormously relatable and absolutely endlessly reusable. There are at least a dozen times a day when we could use this. Like when for instance Jurgen Klopp uses his press conference specifically to render this piece 73 per cent less topical than it was and force us to write a whole new top for it.
1) ‘Well done boys, good process’
Just perfect, isn’t it? An instant and permanent place in the Barclays Pantheon. Straight up there on Our League Mount Rushmore with ‘These are facts’ and ‘It was just banter’ and ‘I will love it if we beat them’ and ‘Lads, it’s Tottenham’ and now also, we must concede, ‘I think the only outcome should be a replay’.