For the second time in 16 months, Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp has said that his team is “not the Harlem Globetrotters.” The first time Klopp made this remark, the world famous group of basketball playing entertainers responded by hitting back at Liverpool pretty hard (and humorously) on Twitter.
The German used the analogy, both in September of 2017 and again today, as a way to illustrate his club’s need to provide wins, not entertainment value. Saturday saw Liverpool beat Brighton & Hove Albion not in a high-scoring, swashbuckling manner of result, but instead by a final score of just 1-0.
Football fans and pundits have come to associate Liverpool with typically more enthralling games than the one we saw on Premier League match day 22.
“When we started [the season] and we had results, people thought the difference between the City or Rome home game in the Champions League last year was too big,” Klopp said during his press conference after the game.
“It’s absolutely OK.”
“We are not the Harlem Globetrotters, we have to deliver results. It’s difficult enough. For that we need to perform. The performance was good. It was not the best performance of the season in a few parts, but from a maturity point of view, I would say it was the most mature performance of the season. It’s so important. On a good day, everybody can win a football games.
“On an average day, not a lot of football teams can win football games. On a bad day, pretty much only a few teams can win football games.”
“Today was not a bad day, it was a difficult day for us. It was just a difficult game because Brighton is doing really well. We played a lot of times against a 4-5-1 system, but how they do it is different. I’m really happy that the boys took the game like it is.”
The first time Jurgen Klopp made this remark, the Harlem Globetrotters Twitter account quote tweeted a video of it, and tagged Liverpool, mentioning how they have won 4,000 straight games and counting.
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net, which is partnered with News Now. Banks, a former writer for NBC Chicago.com and Chicago Tribune.com, regularly appears as a guest pundit on WGN CLTV and co-hosts the “Let’s Get Weird, Sports” podcast on SB Nation.
He also contributes sociopolitical essays to Chicago Now. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram. The content of his cat’s Instagram account is unquestionably superior to his.