When Liverpool lost to Crystal Palace last November, Jürgen Klopp commented on the exodus of home supporters after Scott Dann had scored for Alan Pardew’s side in the 82nd minute.
He talked about feeling alone as he watched the fans leave the ground. He reminded fans who had become fatalistic that anything can happen in a football match.
“We decide when it’s over,” he said.
The game was over for Liverpool after nine minutes against Borussia Dortmund on Thursday night. Thomas Tuchel’s side had scored two away goals in a blistering opening, playing with all the style and verve that was missing from their first leg performance.
Tuchel has taken Dortmund forward, but he is a different type of manager to Klopp. He talked graciously afterwards about the night being “illogical”, as if this was a great and disappointing mystery that modern science will one day come to terms with. Klopp is different. For Klopp, the illogical is his greatest ally.
Otherwise, against a team like Dortmund, those two goals should have been, as Klopp said later, “a killer”. But it was a strange game too, Klopp said and the strangeness made it one of those magical nights at Anfield where Liverpool achieve the improbable as if it had been inevitable all along, as if they decide when it’s over.
“We had a plan, but we conceded two goals,” Klopp said ruefully of the first stunning 45 minutes. Liverpool seemed lost. They had chances throughout the first half, but with every squandered moment, it looked like being a night when Dortmund’s class would decide the quarter-final.
It looked like being a night that reminded you that, while anything can happen in a football match, it usually doesn’t. But Liverpool have changed in the past five months.
“Between 82 and 94 minutes, you can make eight goals, if you like,” Klopp had said last November.
They didn’t need eight against Dortmund, but when Dejan Lovren headed in a fourth in injury-time, it was the end of an astonishing night, but, even as importantly, it was sign that the mission Klopp started on that lonely winter evening is taking shape.
At Anfield on Thursday night, Liverpool’s players never believed it was over. Divock Origi scored once early in the second half, but Marco Reus elegantly scored Dortmund’s third and it really did seem over.
Klopp asked his players to show character at half-time, even if it was in pursuit of a lost cause. But his fundamental belief that a superior team can always be knocked off course was demonstrated in the second half.
He wanted Liverpool to show qualities of endurance and heart. “You need passion,” he said, while Dortmund were stunned by the relentless wave of elementary attacks from the home side. They couldn’t cope, and they weren’t helped by that great unquantifiable force, the Anfield support on those nights when they feel the impossible might be possible.
They will believe it now, maybe soon like they once regularly believed it, but they will know too that this was Klopp asked of the team and the supporters when he looked for that unity of purpose last November. He knows no other way. It is illogical and irrational, but magical too.
“We have to show character,” Klopp said later, before he reflected on what he’d seen and acknowledged that his players had gone beyond that. “Ok, they did a little bit more.” Liverpool did a little bit more. They decided when it was over.
