Jurgen Klopp has claimed Sergio Ramos put Mohamed Salah ‘down like a wrestler’ as Liverpool’s manager finally broke his silence on the Champions League final. Speaking for the first time in detail about the pain Liverpool suffered 63 days ago, Klopp has given a wide-ranging interview ahead of the new season in which he:
Criticises Ramos’s behaviour and calls him ‘ruthless’; goes into detail about the concussion goalkeeper Loris Karius suffered and explains why he would have broken the world record for new No 1 Alisson Becker even if Liverpool had beaten Real Madrid in Kiev; laughs off Jose Mourinho’s attempts to get him to engage in mind games.
Recounting what happened on the night Liverpool lost 3-1, Klopp — whose side face Manchester United here on Saturday — said: ‘I’m not sure if it is an experience we will have again. Go there and put an elbow to the goalkeeper, put their goalscorer down like a wrestler in midfield and then you win.’
The question takes him by surprise. Jurgen Klopp has settled down in a conference room at Liverpool’s team hotel and is preparing to discuss the new season. Before he can start to look forward, though, Klopp is asked to revisit Liverpool’s 3-1 defeat by Real Madrid in the Champions League final. Or — more specifically — the incident in the 26th minute that led to Mohamed Salah leaving the field in tears following Sergio Ramos’s challenge.
Ramos, the totem of the modern Madrid, said plenty on the subject afterwards, among other things claiming Salah was taken off too early and could have continued with the aid of a pain-killing injection. So what did Klopp make of it all?
‘We are opening that bottle again?’ he replies. There is a puff of the cheeks and a long pause. Once Klopp has gathered his thoughts, he proceeds to speak, unbroken, for 10 minutes. The words he chooses are blunt and leave you in no doubt that he holds Ramos responsible.
‘I watched that back, of course,’ said Klopp. ‘Someone showed it to me immediately after the game. But if you watch it back and you are not with Real Madrid then you think it is ruthless and brutal. You don’t think, “Wow! Good challenge”. It was ruthless.
‘That was the story. Ramos said a lot of things I didn’t like. As a person, I didn’t like his reactions. He was like, “Whatever! What do they want? It’s normal!” No. It isn’t normal. If VAR is coming this is a situation where you have to look again, not to give a red card, but to say, “What is that?”
‘If you put all of the situations of Ramos together — and I’ve watched football since I was five years old — then you will see a lot of situations with Ramos. In the final the year before, against Juve, he was responsible for the red card for Juan Cuadrado.
‘The world out there accepts that you use each weapon to win the game. People probably expect that I am the same. I am not.’
‘If you write this people will say I’m weak, a bad loser or a whiner,’ Klopp continues. ‘I’m not. I accept it. You have asked me about it. It’s not like I wake up in the morning and think “RAMOS!” (he jumps out his chair for effect) I’m fine with it. We were a competitor. But in a final you need to have a bit of luck and we didn’t have it. Then there was the situation with Loris.’
A situation which didn’t fully come to light until three days after Liverpool had returned home from Kiev. Loris Karius, their goalkeeper, had been elbowed in the head by Ramos.
No foul was given and the German never asked for treatment. He was subsequently diagnosed with concussion after being examined by Dr Ross Zafonte and Dr Lenore Herget at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital.
‘What did you think in the moment when (that story) came out?’ Klopp asks. ‘Come on. Be honest.’
The honest answer is that many saw it as an excuse, a story designed to offer protection for a goalkeeper whose errors led to Madrid’s first and third goals. Klopp takes it all on board before putting forward the reality of the situation.
‘Franz Beckenbauer called me,’ Klopp explains. ‘He started with, “Your goalkeeper had concussion”. I said, “What?”. He said “I’ve come from (Bayern Munich doctor) Hans Muller-Wohlfahrt and he said he knew immediately in the situation that Loris had concussion when Ramos hit him.”
‘People said we made the medical report public because it’s policy. It’s not. We didn’t use it one second as an excuse. But how can we not put it out as an explanation? The problem is that people still don’t believe it. Then we bring in a new goalkeeper and people think we don’t believe it as well.’