After having just vanquished Manchester City 2-1 at the Etihad, and 5-1 on aggregate in the UEFA Champions League quarterfinals, Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp deemed his opponent the best team in the world at the moment.
Hyperbole to be sure, yes, but for much of the season, sports writers all over the world were hyping up City as one of the best teams in not just English, but also European history. Some even put City on the same pedestal as Sir Alex Ferguson’s 1998-99 team, the first English side to win a treble.
It was easy to understand why such analogies were being made, as City looked invincible much of the season. However, Liverpool showed everybody how to beat them. It turns out 2017-18 Man City is human after all.
“This league is unbelievably strong, this competition is unbelievably strong,” Jurgen Klopp said at his post match news conference.
“You cannot imagine how much intensity you feel before a game like this. I really think they are the best team in the world at the moment but I knew we could beat them. We completely deserve to be in the semifinals.
“Everybody wrote me a message — ‘I will watch the game here, I will watch the game there, I will have a beer together with friends…’ I would really like to do that as well, to drink a beer and watch a Champions League game. Unfortunately, it is always work.”
“It’s all good but it’s not that you can enjoy it completely, but I don’t care who is in [the competition]. We are here and we deserved it, and I am really happy about that.”
Man City will still end the season with two trophies, the EFL Cup and the Premier League title. They’ll also break plenty of Premier League records for the emphatic manner in which they dominated domestically. Still Jurgen Klopp figured something out that others could not, and he’s now living up to the hype that accompanied his replacing Brendan Rodgers in October 2015.
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net and TheBank.News, which is partnered with News Now. Banks, a former writer for the Washington Times, NBC Chicago.com and Chicago Tribune.com, currently contributes regularly to WGN CLTV and the Tribune company’s blogging community Chicago Now.
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