Klopp, a man who is understandably adored on the red half of Merseyside but similarly understandably seems to irritate the rest of the footballing nation, reckons Liverpool’s Premier League clash against Tottenham should be replayed owing to the calamitous VAR clanger that led to Luis Diaz’s goal being disallowed.
Poor you, Jurgen.
Poor old Klopp and Liverpool, that team that always seems to be so hard done by when it comes to refereeing decisions, fixture scheduling and even – most recently after his side’s Europa League win in Austria at LASK – the conditions of opponents’ pitches.
Klopp is an intelligent man and knew exactly what he was doing in this week’s much-publicised press conference, making an entirely improbable demand that will inevitably never materialise but at the same time, intentionally adding further fuel to the fire and elongating the discussion so it now seems like Liverpool are somehow owed something by officials.
The irony of Klopp’s comments was two-fold, not only seeming to position the six-time European champions as more unfortunate than any other club but also, calling for another game to be added to that increasingly congested fixture list he spends his life taking aim and moaning at.
But more broadly, and if Klopp did miraculously ever get his way, the entitled German’s demands would pave the way for an entirely more ludicrous debate about replaying matches whenever a decision wrongly went against a particular team.
Where do you draw the line?
On that basis, Norwich City fans should have seen their team replay that infamous Premier League opener with Crystal Palace at Carrow Road where Simon Hooper inexplicably disallowed Cameron Jerome’s acrobatic overhead kick.
And six years earlier, what about that League One clash under the Friday night lights where Eddie Ilderton’s ineptitude helped haul Tranmere Rovers to a shock 3-1 victory over Paul Lambert’s promotion-chasers?
Or, on the topic of Tottenham getting the rub of the officiating green, that festive top-flight game back in 2018 where Teemu Pukki’s strike was unable to stand owing to the unnecessarily excessive intervention of technology and those stupid Stockley Park lines?
The point being: refereeing errors are, and have always been, part and parcel of football and just an annoying element of the game us fans are forced to deal with.
And while the one that occurred in North London on Saturday was more unique and blundering than most, the idea that it means a special case should be made for the game to be replayed remains a totally preposterous proposition.
VAR promised Premier League fans perfection but instead, all it’s done is lead to even more high-profile errors and suck the joy out of watching a game of football.
I’ll never forget celebrating that perfectly good Pukki goal before the inevitable angles were analysed and he was ruled offside by the most minute, microscopic and miserable of margins.
Which is one of the reasons why I genuinely prefer the joys of the Championship, a division where football remains in a purer form and you’re able to get annoyed at refereeing errors, complain about it with mates before retreating home ahead of the cycle – which more often than not, does even itself out throughout the season – invariably continuing.
As it currently stands, VAR in the Premier League will never completely remove mistakes from the game and is only serving to exacerbate debates – and the toxicity of them – when it comes to officials and referees.
And it’s that environment it has created that has led to comments like Klopp’s, demands that would have never been made in a pre-VAR era and ones that make the Liverpool boss sound even more immature than ever.
The implementation of VAR has become too entrenched for it to be scrapped so sadly, and in some form, it looks like it’s here to stay.
But from a Norwich City perspective, I will continue to prefer following my team in a league where it does not exist and – like it always was – you simply deal with the odd howler, are able to celebrate goals when they go in and, more generally, enjoy the game in a more authentic and natural form.
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