Jurgen Klopp Liverpool
Jurgen Klopp says Liverpool have no plans to rush “long-term prospect” Harvey Elliott back too soon. The teenager has been back at work at the club’s AXA Training Centre for the last few weeks, continuing to rehab the injury with the coaches at the Kirkby facility.
Jurgen Klopp said: “I saw him running this morning. He has a foot injury and there are rusty mornings when you get up and it does feel rusty, but he is running outside now with full body weight on it, that is a good sign. When he will be back I have no idea. From a mental point of view, Harvey is rather an old soul, I would say he is very mature for a young age. He is completely fine with the situation, he has accepted it, he deals with it. Everybody around tries to help him. I think I must try and cheer him up some days, but it is rarely needed because he has a brilliant family at home and is a rather positive fella. And yes we all hope from a physical point of view a young age helps him to recover quickly but quickly is not so important. Fully is the main thing. At the moment, and I hope I don’t eat my words, but I cannot see a scenario where we would think about rushing him back. He is our long-term prospect and each day we can get him back earlier is great but we will not rush that.”
Speaking at a first non-digital press conference since March 2020 on Friday, Klopp was also asked about the tactical similarities between him and the incoming interim manager at Manchester United, Ralf Rangnick.
Jurgen Klopp added: “He had a mentor when he was a very young coach, his name was Helmut Gross, then he had this influence from there. My influence came from working with Wolfgang Frank, I learned with these kinds of things and learned about those ideas. We didn’t meet for a long, long time but the approach was for sure similar in the beginning. Some ideas are the same, we are both determined to organise a team properly – that’s all true – but in the end there is a moment when it splits in all directions pretty much, because you have to use all things in the game. So the very early starts of the development in the press game in Germany, was purely without the ball. The gegenpress doesn’t work unless you win the ball and go for it, but the first idea was to defend as a team and press properly, ball-orientated, defending. That is what it was called and how it all started years and years ago. At the time in Germany pretty much all of the teams would play 3-5-2 with a proper libero (sweeper) behind, and we used the ‘WM system’ which it is called in Germany, so that’s when it started, and that’s how we were educated. And then of course the younger ones, I’m younger than Ralf, when I started he had been in a few different clubs, and I started the coaching and I was influenced by Frank that’s true. I cannot really compare it but I know from all the talks with him that our ideas are not far away from each other, that’s for sure. But that’s not all you do, you have an idea but you have to adapt it to your team, and that is I found myself it’s not easy when you come in the middle of the season and there are 20 games between here and New Year’s Eve pretty much. That’s a massive challenge because the things you want to change on the pitch we all don’t have time for that. So even if your team is already educated in that you still need long long long meetings and there’s no chance of that. It will be interesting.”
