Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp has voiced his opinions about the team’s Champions League Final defeat to Real Madrid for the first time. The German was quite critical of Sergio Ramos, calling him a wrestler. The 51-year old was totally ‘mum’ about the incidents that happened in Kiev two months ago. But, when reporters asked him the same ahead of Liverpool’s ICC encounter against Manchester United, Klopp didn’t hesitate to speak.
Klopp said, “We are opening that bottle again?” “It is action-reaction-action-reaction and I don’t like that but – if you watch it back and you are not with Real Madrid – then you think it is ruthless and brutal. I saw the ref taking charge of big games at the World Cup and nobody really thinks about that later. But in a situation like that somebody needs to judge it better. If VAR is coming then it is a situation where you have to look again. Not to give a red card but to look again and say: ‘What is that?’ It was ruthless.
“I’m not sure it is an experience we will have again – go there and put an elbow to the goalkeeper, put their goalscorer down like a wrestler in midfield and then you win the game. That was the story of the game. Ramos said a lot of things afterwards that I didn’t like. As a person I didn’t like the reactions of him. He was like: ‘Whatever, what do they want? It’s normal.’ No, it is not normal. If you put all of the situations of Ramos together then you will see a lot of situations with Ramos. The year before against Juve he was responsible for the red card for [Juan] Cuadrado. Nobody talks about that afterwards. It is like we, the world out there, accepts that you use each weapon to win the game. People probably expect that I am the same. I am not.”
Klopp added, “We are aggressive but I always use the word ‘legal as well’. Usually if you try something you will get punished. Someone will see it and ban you for four or five weeks. But in this example, no one. This ref should have had the courage to decide that game. In this situation we didn’t get it and, if you write this, people will say I am weak or a bad loser or a whiner. I am not. I accept it. It’s not like I wake up in the morning and think: ‘Ramos!’”
“In a final you need to have a bit of luck and we didn’t have it. They had luck in different situations and we didn’t. They scored a bicycle kick, come on! We all know [Gareth] Bale can do that but he probably put more balls from that situation in the stands than in the goal. If that’s not luck then I don’t know what is. Then the situation around Loris.”
Liverpool goalkeeper Loris Karius had tested positive for concussion a few days before the Champions League Final. Yet, he played the match and made some huge errors due which made him the subject of several social media trolls.
Klopp said, “We didn’t use the concussion as an excuse for one second but how can we not put it out as an explanation? The problem is only now that people still don’t believe it, and then we bring in a new goalkeeper and people think we don’t believe it as well, which is not true.”
The German also said that Liverpool had planned to sign Alisson all along. He said,“If Alisson was on the market and we’d won the final, we would have gone for him, because he’s the goalkeeper we want. The other goalkeepers are really good, like all our other players, but that doesn’t mean we don’t bring in another one. We bring in another one because we can make the next step with the new players, like Naby [Keita] and all the others.”
