Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur will not forget their journey to the final of the UEFA Champions League in a hurry. They have taken a road full of twists and turns, vanishing from sight at one bend, only to reappear in dramatic fashion at the next.
Neither side could be certain of a place in the knockouts even in the dying minutes of the final round of group matches. Tottenham survived Manchester City’s onslaught in the quarterfinals by the tiniest of margins. In the semifinals, both teams were on the ropes, seemingly beaten until they surged back from the dead, producing two nights of epic drama.
“I don’t know if it happened before; I don’t know if it will happen again. I will remember this night forever,” Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp said after that 4-0 second-leg win over Barcelona . Tottenham’s players, seconds away from elimination, left their manager a sobbing wreck on the turf with their 96th-minute winner in Amsterdam . “Thank you football. Thank you my players, they are heroes,” Mauricio Pochettino said afterwards, choking up. “Without football it is impossible to live.”
Similar projects
And so on Saturday, only for the second time in the history of the competition, two English sides will contest the final of the Champions League. They are not, it would appear, equals. This Premier League season, Liverpool earned 26 points more than Tottenham, scored 22 goals more and conceded 17 fewer. Klopp’s men lost only once all season, and finished the league campaign with nine straight wins, missing out on the title by a solitary point. In contrast, Tottenham limped over the line, winning only three of its last 12 league fixtures, scoring a mere 13 goals in that period. And four of those came in one game against an already-relegated Huddersfield.
There is no denying which the superior unit is, but it is impossible not to be struck by the similarities in the projects Pochettino and Klopp have embarked on at their respective clubs, the stunning revivals they have overseen. Also binding them is their style of football: an intense, high-pressing game. There may be differences in how each manager interprets that idea, but the underlying philosophy is the same.
In his first three full seasons in charge of Liverpool, Klopp has delivered a hat-trick of top-four Premier League finishes: in the seven previous campaigns, the club had achieved that just once. This year he very nearly delivered that league title Anfield has so desperately sought, and has now taken Liverpool to successive Champions League finals. Klopp once pointed out that he was “not a messiah, only a coach”; the city of Liverpool (one half of it, at least) will argue otherwise.
All about pressing
In German football writer Raphael Honigstein’s Bring the Noise: The Jurgen Klopp Story , a fascinating portrait of Klopp’s ‘Gegenpressing’ system emerges. In theory it is a simple enough idea: press the opposition high up the pitch as a team, force the ball into areas that you overload, win possession back, attack, and prepare to go again.
The failure of even a single attacking player to press, though, could offer the rival side an easy outlet. It is why it is essential for an entire squad to buy into the concept.
“It’s an agreement a team makes with itself,” Liverpool’s assistant manager Peter Krawietz tells the author. “A social contract: ‘Yes, we want to do that together.’ One guy doing it by himself is nothing.”
It is more efficient for three or four players to press quick and hard than for eight to track back after losing the ball, he argues. “That’s why it’s not so much a question of your legs but of the mind. You have that moment where you have to overcome your inertia. Don’t switch off.”
Running their socks off
Sebastian Kehl, who captained Borussia Dortmund under Klopp, describes the system as “very, very wild running” towards the ball. Neven Subotic, his teammate at the time, admits that coping with it was not simple. “It’s mentally and physically very demanding,” he says in Bring the Noise . “You were used to running 105km per game as a team. Suddenly, you were up to 115km, and the target was to hit 120km or more. Klopp knew that couldn’t happen overnight. He knew everybody had played 20 years of football and never been asked to work to such a plan before.”
At Tottenham, Pochettino’s rebuilding job has been nothing short of incredible. A club without the financial muscle of its rivals has managed three top-three finishes during the Argentine’s first four years in charge. A club that had only ever featured in the Champions League once (in 2010) before Pochettino’s arrival, has now qualified for the tournament four times in a row. A club simply not used to being in the Champions League is now, for the first time in its history, in the final of the competition.
Since Pochettino’s appointment in 2014, Tottenham’s net spend has been £29 million. Among Premier League sides, only Southampton has spent a smaller sum over the same period. Even Fulham, Brighton, Huddersfield, Burnley and Cardiff have made a greater outlay.
Last summer, Tottenham did not sign a single player. The lack of transfer activity is not, Pochettino insists, entirely a reflection on the club’s finances. “The more defined your playing style is, the more difficult transfers become,” he says in Brave New World: Inside Pochettino’s Spurs, his account of the 2016-17 season (authored by Guillem Balague). “Because either a player gives you something specific that you’re lacking, or you’re better off not signing anyone.”
Chaos theory
That playing style guides every decision Pochettino makes. Marcelo Bielsa, one of his first coaches at Newell’s Old Boys, has clearly been an influence. “I want my teams to provoke a controlled disorder, to create so much movement that it distresses the opposition,” Pochettino says in Brave New World.
He offers an example of his methods of drilling that frantic intensity into the Tottenham squad: “We’d play an hour-long 11-a-side game on Wednesdays, with no stoppages — there were no corners or goal-kicks. If the ball went out of play, the game would restart immediately with another ball. It was relentless. Those players have told me since that, even today, they still hear Jesus [Perez, assistant] yelling out ‘press, press, press’ in their dreams.”
Whatever the outcome on Saturday, it should be possible to appreciate the tasks Klopp and Pochettino have accomplished, bringing a variety of football to the Premier League that has now seen two English sides reach the final.
Thrilling, brutal, manic
It is true though that Liverpool’s rendition of that high-pressing style has been more thrilling, manic and brutal than anything Tottenham has produced. Liverpool has confidence, form and pedigree, its front three of Sadio Mane, Mohamed Salah, and Roberto Firmino arguably the best attacking assembly in the world.
But in Christian Eriksen, who according to Pochettino understands the requirements of his pressing game better than anyone else, Son Heung-min, Dele Alli, Lucas Moura and Harry Kane (fitness permitting), Tottenham possesses a remarkably diverse and intelligent combination of attacking players.
Besides, in a final, there is something to be said for composure and the ability to make sound decisions under pressure. As Manchester City and Ajax found out, even a moment’s lapse in concentration can be fatal.
