The medics have spoken and Liverpool boss Jurgen Klopp is happy to take their word for it.
Although it did not surface until after Liverpool’s 3-1 Champions League final defeat to Real Madrid, footage of Sergio Ramos clattering Loris Karius in the box did not look good.
Had Ramos not already knocked Mo Salah out of the final by tangling with him and bringing him crashing to the turf, one might have put preconceptions to one side and let the Spanish star off. However, such is Ramos’ combative and exacting nature that the two incidents looked more calculated on second and third viewings.
Anyone noticed THAT?! 49 th Minute: #Ramos hit #Karius against his head! 😳 #UCLfinal pic.twitter.com/f0SEgzdMkS
— Prometheus (@68Bor) May 26, 2018
History is shaped by the victors, we are told (possibly by victors), so Liverpool only had a set amount of time to gripe about decisions that did not go their way in Kiev.
A couple of days of complaining was perfectly understandable but the grousing has seeped into 2018/19, with Klopp calling Ramos’ actions ‘brutal and ruthless’.
In an interview with the Liverpool Echo, the Reds boss gave his take on the days after that final defeat and the surprising news that his goalkeeper was concussed from the 47th minute on.
During his interview, Klopp asked a reporter, “What did you think in the moment when [the concussion news] came out? Come on, be honest.”
The reporter replied that he felt it was an excuse.
“Yeah,” Klopp said with a nod of his head, “but it’s not. It’s the truth.”
Klopp completely backs those medical findings but even he was surprised when, five days after the final, he learned the news. He recalls:
“Franz Beckenbaeur called me, that’s exactly how it was, and he started with, ‘Your goalkeeper had concussion’.
“I said, ‘What?’ Beckenbaeur said ‘I’ve come from Dr Hans Muller-Wohlfahrt [in Boston] and he said he knew immediately in the situation that he had concussion when Ramos hit him’.
“And then it came back to me because in the game, from my position, without having replays, you see the knock and then I see the reaction of Loris, but then you look already somewhere else. Then I think, ‘Stop, I have to watch it back’.
“How can we imagine that a player, who didn’t show any signs, not in that game, not before that game, that he will do these things, that it’s not influenced by the knock?”
Klopp was just as rocked by the news, and questioned it until he went back and reviewed the footage. Aside from the goals he conceded to Karim Benzema and Gareth Bale [the long-range effort], Karius had two outbursts during the second half – one with a teammate and the other with a match official – that are out of character.
Something was off in Kiev, that night, but, as Conan Doherty has pointed out, it’s not exactly as if the German was flawless coming into the final.
