Jürgen Klopp Looks Back on the Eve of Liverpool’s COVID-19 Isolation

Jürgen Klopp fired up his video chat on Friday morning to offer more positive messages into our new COVID-19 world. The Liverpool manager along with staff and players and the majority of the people on earth have been isolated at home for what feels like an eternity without football.

Speaking on the club’s official site, Klopp was optimistic about the future but ruminated on the strange the circumstances in which he found himself, as a famous manager of a famous football team in the time of coronavirus.

“It is two weeks ago, but it feels like it is ages ago that we played Atletico and Thursday was a day off. I remember, we all knew about the situation with coronavirus around the world but we were still ‘in our tunnel’, if you want, and until then it didn’t really arrive into our mind in England.

“We played the Bournemouth game on Saturday, we won it, then Sunday City lost, so the information for us was ‘two wins to go’. But then on Monday morning, I woke up and heard about the situation in Madrid, that they would close the schools and universities from Wednesday, so it was really strange to prepare for that game, to be honest.

“I usually don’t struggle with things around me, I can build barriers right and left when I prepare for a game, but in that moment it was really difficult. Wednesday we had the game, I loved the game, I loved what I saw from the boys, it was a really, really good performance other than the result – we didn’t score enough, we conceded too many, that’s all clear, but between these two main pieces of information it was a brilliant game!

“Thursday [we were] off and then Friday when we arrived it was already clear this is not a session. Yes, we trained, but it was more of a meeting. We had a lot of things to talk about, a lot of things to think about, things I never thought before in my life about.

“Nobody knew exactly – and nobody knows exactly – how it will go on, so the only way we could do it was to organise it as good as possible for the boys and make sure everything is sorted as much as we can sort it in our little space, in the little area where we are responsible, really. That’s what we did in a very short time, then we sent the boys home, went home ourselves and here we are still.”

Small training sessions are happening or will begin to happen at Melwood shortly. Otherwise, the coaching staff have been providing training exercises to the players through WhatsApp and tried to create some semblance of a normal routine for them.

When the action finally does kick off again, we shouldn’t be surprised to find that Klopp has the most physically fit team ready to walk out on a football pitch.