By Ed Caesar
Before the second game of his team’s Champions League semifinal against Barcelona, Liverpool’s manager, Jürgen Klopp, summoned Samuel Beckett. In the first game of the two-game series, at Camp Nou, in Barcelona, a week earlier, Liverpool had played well, and lost 3–0. One of the goals Liverpool conceded—a rasping, freakishly curved free kick by the world’s best player, Lionel Messi—was regarded as among the finest ever scored in the competition. In the second game, at Anfield, Klopp’s team would not only have to stop an excellent Barcelona attack from adding to the three-goal lead but score at least three itself. And they would need to do so without their star center-forward, Mo Salah, who was ruled out of the game with a concussion. Liverpool’s task was, many believed, near impossible.
Klopp, an amiable German whose transparent-framed spectacles and professorial manner do not so much scream “Premiership manager” as “Gestalt therapist,” embraced the slenderness of the odds. In an interview with the Guardian published on Monday, he told a reporter, “We want to celebrate the Champions League campaign, either with a proper finish or another goal. That is the plan: just try. If we can do it, wonderful. If not, then fail in the most beautiful way.” “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better,” Beckett wrote, in “Worstward Ho”; when you are 3–0 down against Messi’s Barcelona, you could do worse than reach for an Irish modernist with a disdain for realism.
The Champions League is the most important, and most interesting, competition in club football. The best teams in Europe, and most of the stars of the world game, take part. Winning the trophy sparks uncontained and long-remembered joy for the victorious fans. At Manchester United matches, one of the most popular songs—“December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night),” sung to the Four Seasons tune—is about United’s late winning goal in the Champions League Final of 1999.
Part of the thrill of watching the Champions League is seeing the clash of opposing footballing philosophies. On Tuesday, Klopp’s highly evolved gegenpressing—soccer’s equivalent of the full-court press—was pitted against the elegant, possession-based approach of Barcelona. But it’s rare to be made aware of actual, non-strategic philosophical differences between the two teams. Soccer teams are businesses that rely on success. In giving his players permission to fail on one of the most important nights of their careers, Klopp reminded them that football is just sport. The result matters, but not as much as you might think. With that safety net in place, his players had fun.
My God, it was fun. Divock Origi—who played in place of the injured Salah—scored within eight minutes. Liverpool’s task was still mountainous. Because of the away-goals rule, in which teams tied over two games are separated by the number of goals scored away from home, a single goal from Barcelona would have meant that Liverpool needed to score five to win. In the forty-five minutes that followed Origi’s goal, Messi’s ingenious passing split Liverpool’s defence a handful of times. It seemed likely that Barcelona would score at least one. But no goal came. Then, in the second half, in three mad minutes, a Dutch substitute, Georginio Wijnaldum, scored twice for Liverpool: the first time meeting a low cross with a powerful right foot, and then jumping, seemingly, a yard off the floor to head another cross into the net. The score was 3–3 on aggregate.
At this point, Liverpool could have been forgiven for ditching Beckett. The prospect of reaching the Champions League final was now real. Messi still harassed its defense, and he had an excellent chance to score. But Liverpool continued to play, in both senses of the word.
In the seventy-ninth minute, Liverpool was awarded a corner kick. The team’s twenty-year-old homegrown star, Trent Alexander-Arnold, placed the ball and then walked away, as if he were waiting for someone else to take the kick. Then, having spotted Barcelona’s defenders ambling to their positions, he darted back to the corner and crossed the ball to Origi, who was standing a few yards from goal, unmarked. Origi scored. Liverpool’s fans lost their minds. Alexander-Arnold’s move was impish in the extreme, and utterly in keeping with his team’s attitude. He wasn’t worried about failure, or looking foolish, and so he tried a magic trick. Liverpool won beautifully, 4–0, and progressed to the final.
Tottenham Hotspur’s players, who awaited the second game of their semifinal against Ajax the following night, watched Liverpool’s so-called “Miracle at Anfield” in their Amsterdam hotel. How could they not have been inspired? Like Liverpool, they had lost the first game of their semifinal (in this case, 0–1). Also, like Liverpool, they were without their leading goal-scorer, England’s captain, Harry Kane. They were underdogs.
Ajax is a wonderful team to watch. Its players pass with precision, break upfield with pace, and move in dizzying geometric patterns. Last night, Ajax scored within five minutes. In the thirty-sixth minute, the team scored a second goal—a cannonlike first-touch shot by Hakim Ziyech that might have sheared off the left hand of Hugo Lloris, Tottenham’s French goalkeeper, had he reached it. Indeed, for most of the first half, Ajax was undeniably superior. Tottenham went to its changing room down 2–0 on the night, and 3–0 on aggregate. Three goals were needed in the second half to progress to the final. If anything,Tottenham’s task was more daunting than Liverpool’s had been.
But then Mauricio Pochettino, Tottenham’s Argentine boss, changed his team’s strategy to a more direct approach. Pocchetino is a stirring motivator who exudes Zen-like calm or volcanic emotion as the moment demands. (Danny Rose, the Tottenham wingback, once spoke of a hair-raising halftime talk in which he felt Pocchetino was “sending him to war.”) Pocchettino exhorted his players to greater effort and enterprise. Harry Kane, the striker out with an ankle injury, also entered the changing room, and went—in the words of one fellow-player—“mental.” Tottenham responded to these twin stimuli con brio.
Ten minutes into the second half, Rose, the wingback, pulled a nutmeg. It’s a move straight out of the playground, passing the ball through a defender’s legs: a puckish humiliation. (One of my son’s six-year-old friends nutmegged me in a pickup game in a local park a while ago, and he almost killed himself laughing afterward.) I’m sure Rose didn’t think about the nutmeg as he played it; it was just a means of beating the guy in front of him. But it evinced a calm and lively playfulness. Having so disposed of the Ajax defender, Rose arced a long ball forward to Lucas Moura, Tottenham’s Brazilian forward. He played a pass to Dele Alli, who returned it, before Moura shot low into the corner of the Ajax net, 3–1. Two minutes later, Moura hungrily tracked down a loose ball in the Ajax box, danced away from defenders with his back to the goal, turned, and shot, 3–2.
Tottenham was having fun now. Its fans became noisy. Ajax began to show signs of nerves. If Ajax could hold on, it would play in its first European final in twenty-four years. For more than half an hour after the second Moura goal, Ajax resisted Tottenham. The game in these closing minutes was frantic, and frenetic. Both sides hit shots against the frame of the goal. But, as the final whistle approached, it looked as if the North London side would fail in the most beautiful way, and Ajax, perhaps deservedly, would advance.
It wasn’t until the final minute of injury time that the coup de grace was landed. In the ninety-fifth minute, Dele Alli threaded a pass to Moura. The Brazilian swung his left leg at the edge of the box, smashing the ball into the bottom right corner of the goal, 3–3. Tottenham was ahead on the away-goals rule. There was rapture for the enclave of Tottenham supporters, stunned disbelief in the rest of the stadium. There is no noise quite like the prickly hush of home fans whose hopes have been dashed. The Ajax players lay face-down in the grass. The whistle was blown for the end of the game soon afterward. Tottenham would play Liverpool in the final of the Champions League, in Madrid: the first time two English sides had reached the final in more than a decade.
After the match, Pochettino lost control. He wept so long and so hard that, even at the press conference, he needed to take regular pauses to keep himself in check. At one point, in between the tears, he seemed to unlock an insight about the wellspring of his team’s remarkable performance in Amsterdam. It could equally have been used to describe Liverpool’s joyful resurgence.
“When you work, and feel the love, it’s not a stress, it’s a pleasure,” Pochettino said.
In the same short interview, the Tottenham manager also said what anyone who loves this sport wanted to express, having witnessed two nights of the most nerve-jangling theatre, two comebacks that felt like thrilling relief from a cold and sodden early English summer and Brexit.
“Thank you, football!” Pochettino said. “I am so emotional now.”
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