Farewell Jürgen: how Klopp became a legend among Borussia Dortmund fans
|
Version 0 of 1. Jürgen Klopp may be open about his love of heavy metal but his recent demeanour on the touchline has tended instead to recall a vintage morsel of the Smiths, I Know It’s Over. Saturday’s heated exchange with his captain, Sebastian Kehl, a tactical disagreement in the closing stages of Borussia Dortmund’s defeat at Borussia Mönchengladbach, will now be seen as the natural coda to a season in which a bemused frown replaced the rock star’s scissor jump as the coach’s expression of choice. We should remember Klopp’s tenure at the Westfalen in the light of the latter, rather than the former. The famous stadium’s teeming Südtribüne – the Yellow Wall – will certainly not allow this season’s disappointments to cloud their overall image of the man who brought their vanquished team back to the pinnacle at home and in Europe. Klopp did more than relight the imagination of Dortmund’s fans. He catapulted them above the clouds of their wildest dreams and all the way to heaven. When assessing the entirety of his Dortmund reign, it will always come back to the Bundesliga title wins he authored in 2011 and 2012, with a gleeful 5-2 spanking of Bayern Munich in the German Cup final in Berlin completing a double in the second season. That was a heady day but so was pretty much every one in that two-year spell. After the club almost went bankrupt in March 2005, seeing their team back at the top was not just fun for the faithful – it was staggering. This is why, when Dortmund began to struggle badly in autumn, the outside world’s sense that the club and Klopp were in crisis was not wholly shared locally. It had been a thousand times worse before. Related: Jürgen Klopp: ‘I‘m not taking a sabbatical. I was no longer the perfect coach for Dortmund’ Less quantifiable, but as important, was the joy the coach spread. That huge smile, the fist pumps in the technical area and those bear hugs for his players came to epitomise BVB’s youthful energy as much as Mats Hummels’ sorties out of defence, Mario Götze’s jinking runs or Nuri Sahin’s raking passes. The commitment and audaciousness on the pitch seemed like a logical extension of their mentor’s personality. When the former Dortmund midfielder Kevin‑Prince Boateng joined their local rivals Schalke in August 2013, Klopp sent him a text message asking “Why Schalke????????” (“With eight question marks,” he added for emphasis when telling the story himself, always a keen raconteur). It was a fan’s response, because that is exactly what he had become. When he arrived at Dortmund in 2008, he thought he had the basic structure to build something interesting but he did not anticipate “falling in love” quite as hard as he did, especially after the wrench of finally leaving Mainz after 19 years’ service as player and coach. In November 2013, shortly after signing a contract extension to 2018 and just before a Champions League meeting with Arsenal, Klopp evocatively described the feeling of coming out of the tunnel at Signal Iduna Park as like being born and seeing for the first time. “You come out and you see the best of the world,” he marvelled. Klopp’s magnetism had also boosted Dortmund’s renewed international profile. It was something the club were quick to pick up on, running with widespread enthusiasm for their revival – especially around the 2013 Champions League final – and almost packaging their niceness, with the coach as the demonstrative face of it. That smile was seen a little less often this season. Klopp had ridden out tough moments before, notably finding out Götze would be joining Bayern days before the Champions League semi-final against Real Madrid, but this campaign has been a conveyer belt of bad news, pratfalls and wrong turns. It all started by conceding the quickest goal in Bundesliga history, to Bayer Leverkusen’s Karim Bellarabi after nine seconds of the season’s opening game, and it went downhill from there. Despite Robert Lewandowski’s exit, most still believed that Klopp had the second-best squad in Germany at his disposal. What he did not appear to have was the answers. The gulf between miserable domestic form and still-dazzling European displays was stark. Champions League opponents played on the front foot and allowed Dortmund to counter with pace. Bundesliga adversaries – including modest ones such as Hamburg and Hannover – have sat and defied BVB to break them down, which they have consistently lacked the guile to do. Klopp knew he needed a plan B at the start of the season but a 4-4-2 concocted with Marco Reus at the tip of a midfield diamond ran aground when Reus picked up an ankle injury in the second game of the season, sidelining him for two months. Related: Manchester City cool on Jürgen Klopp despite Manuel Pellegrini’s struggles Worse still is that plan A has not looked too clever either. Dortmund have often lacked their previous intensity, making one wonder if Klopp’s words are still getting through. The faults that undermined last season’s efforts – missing multiple chances and ceding cheap goals – have only escalated despite the return from injury of key performers such as Neven Subotic. Most damning is that expensive signings such as Ciro Immobile and Adrian Ramos are not in Klopp’s XI of choice. Spending substantial sums wisely is a challenge Klopp is likely to face again in his next posting, which will almost certainly be in England. It is, by his own admission, the most logical choice for reasons of the heart as much as linguistic ones – even if a Paris Saint-Germain approach cannot be completely ruled out depending on how their season ends. The adrenaline of English football is made for Klopp. Manchester City would be a steep if fascinating challenge, while Arsène Wenger does not look like stepping aside at Arsenal just yet. A sabbatical, theoretically, would work wonders for his freshness and his reputation. Pep Guardiola and Klopp’s own possible replacement, Thomas Tuchel, saw their value inflate further during a year off. The question is whether Klopp can sit still for that long. According to him, he was passed over for the Hamburg job in favour of Martin Jol in 2008 after wearing a tracksuit to the interview. The enduring magic of his reign at Dortmund means he could probably wear shorts for his next one. |