After over a month and a half since the 2018 UEFA Champions League final, Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp has finally broken his silence on Loris Karius’ disastrous performance that effectively cost the Reds the title.
“The only thing I can say is he (Karius) had a concussion in the game,” Klopp was quoted as saying by the club website.
Karius had been having a decent game right until half-time, but things took a turn for the worse post the interval.
Real Madrid skipper Sergio Ramos, who had already been involved in a tangle with Liverpool talisman Mohamed Salah, that subsequently forced the Egyptian winger to come off with a shoulder injury, crashed into Karius while attempting to get to a corner.
While Karius shrugged off the knock and got back to playing, he would inexplicably gift Real Madrid the opener and things continued to unravel for the Reds as substitute Gareth Bale got himself a brace thanks to some suspect goalkeeping.
“Whoever had a concussion knows there is not one way how it feels, there are different ways. He didn’t feel it obviously. He had a knock on his head and he felt that but he didn’t know he had a concussion. That’s how concussions are. The guy who has it is the last one to be aware of it probably.”
The German custodian received death threats in the aftermath of the tie, but new developments came to light that seemingly exonerated him and Klopp elaborated:
“After four days I got a call from Franz Beckenbauer, our Bobby Moore, our biggest football player who is a good friend of mine. He called me and said he came from a doctor, he told me: your goalkeeper had a concussion. I said, what? because in the game, from my position that situation is not very good to see: ‘maybe there was contact or not. I told him immediately, OK. He said the doctor is the most famous doctor in Germany. I said: OK, give me a few minutes, I have to fix a few things.
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“I got all the pictures from different perspectives, saw it and thought: how can we all think that the boy who didn’t show any weakness in that game until then made these big mistakes in a very important game and nobody thinks it’s because of the knock he got? How can we think that? That was, for me, the explanation and I thought: OK, come on, we need to check that.”
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“I thought it was too late, you cannot check that. But now I know a concussion isn’t coming and going in a day – if you have one, you see it days later. Five days after the final, Loris had 26 of 30 markers for a concussion still. That’s clear.”
“If you ask Loris, he says he didn’t think about it and didn’t use it for a second as an excuse. We don’t use it as an excuse, we use it as an explanation. That’s always important, that’s what analysis should be: you explain why things happen. So, from this point of view, from my side everything is fine. We don’t think about that anymore and we start completely new.”
While Klopp insisted that he wasn’t using the concussion as an excuse, he left no doubts over whether he believe it was the cause for Karius’ two blunders:
“He was influenced by that knock, that is 100 per cent. What the rest of the world is making of it, I don’t care. It’s really not important what the people say. We do not use it as an excuse.Now people could think for us it is the explanation – and for me it is 100 per cent the explanation and that’s all.”
Meanwhile, Liverpool started their pre-season on a brilliant note, beating Chester FC 7-0 in a friendly on Saturday.
They open their Premier League campaign on August 12 when they host West Ham United at Anfield.