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When the top two meet in the Premier League, it’s a knee-jerk (muscle memory for Super Sundays is gone, Doomsday Days) to look for the big boss fight.
Play second first, champions against suitors: the haggard splitscreen, the wild-eyed seers in their padded coats, nose to nose on the touchline, a collision of wills, visions, “philosophies.”
As Tottenham travel to Anfield on Wednesday night, attempts will be made to re-erect this family machine around José Mourinho and Jürgen Klopp. This is a gathering of not just first and second, but pleasantly contrasting styles: cheerful versus grumpy, high pressure versus low lock, hug on the sideline versus rabbit punch to the kidneys.
And yet somehow Klopp versus Mourinho doesn’t really work out that way. There is something here, a kind of anti-chemistry. Damn, they actually seem to like each other.
Most rivalries are exaggerated or the product of theatrical conventions. With Klopp and Mourinho there is a blossoming of something that almost feels like affection. Only last month did they agree on player exhaustion, when, frankly, we would have preferred a furious war of words.
Klopp called Mourinho a “world-class coach” earlier in the year. José – yes, that José – described Klopp as “one of the best.” Attempts have been made over the years to fake it, with the occasional hit on spending or resources. But there seems to be an inconvenient degree of professional respect here.
Fortunately, this is a pairing with a lot of real substance beyond the operetta. In Mourinho’s case, the strange advantage, because there must always be a strange advantage, is with Liverpool FC itself, another football institution that seems to have set its sights on assaulting in one way or another.
The first contact came in March 2004 when Mourinho’s agent approached Liverpool to discuss the sale of players, then made it clear over coffee with Rick Parry that his man, José, would be willing to come to Anfield once. win the Champions League. The offer was a bit crude given that Gérard Houllier was on site. Liverpool passed.
So Mourinho kept coming back in other ways. The notorious shut up gesture – no one makes an incendiary gesture like José – after Steven Gerrard’s own goal in the 2005 League Cup final against his Chelsea side. Epic encounters in the Champions League. Then of course there was April 2014, Demba Ba and all that.
It was shocking at the time to see how much Mourinho enjoyed destroying Liverpool’s title push at Anfield that season, stalking the touchline full time, pounding his chest, screaming at the crowd.
Mourinho had been irritated having to play the game on Sunday afternoon, three days before a Champions League semi-final against Atlético de Madrid. He was sick with a virus and had to isolate himself on the way to the game. He appeared unshaven, sallow and angry. Chelsea continues to lose to Atlético. But it clearly felt like a previous comfort.
And now we have this, a visit from the team Mourinho calls “my Spurs”, to a private full-house Anfield. Although the rarity of the season also fuels the occasion.
Wednesday night marks a third of the way through the Premier League program, with Tottenham at the top and unbeaten since opening day. They play Liverpool again at the end of January. Before, it’s Leicester at home, then Wolves, Fulham, Leeds, Villa, Sheffield United. The points collected in that spell, between the champions at home and away, will decide how serious Tottenham’s career is.
The draw at Crystal Palace on Sunday was a reminder that at times it has been a matter of tooth skin. This is a team with good margins and low methods. Spurs have scored nine goals in their last seven Premier League games. Five of the last seven have gone to the last minute with the result still on the razor’s edge.
It’s a stretch to talk about the homeless when you’ve got a billion-pound stadium, the best striker in the league and a coach with titles in four European countries. But this has been Mourinho to absurdity at times, a team apparently convinced that they are in a dogfight for relegation and risking looking up at the end of the season to discover that they just won the league.
Is this sustainable? The last team to win Mourinho’s title at Chelsea attacked in numbers before Christmas, only sinking back into Kurt-Zouma mode in midfield once the home stretch was in sight. It would be an act of monumental self-flagellation, and certainly unlikely, to continue winning this way from here.
This game also comes at a time of good margins for Liverpool. There have been passages of that familiar clarity, but this is also a snooty squad. Five teens have played in the last two weeks. Liverpool has three wins in its last eight games and 23 shots on goal in its last six. And yet there is also the feeling that they could click at any moment, that the actual ignition is waiting to happen.
Mourinho’s obvious tactical adjustment with Spurs could boost that either way. It appears that the game will take place in a kind of hot zone between the midway point and Tottenham’s penalty area. Klopp likes a destructive creative press; Mourinho likes his team to sink and use the space this offers in attack.
The question is to what extent Klopp will change to quell this. Roy Hodgson showed a way over the weekend, refusing to let his team get too engaged in attack and playing long passes to the box, letting the low block suffocate.
Will Jordan Henderson and Gini Wijnaldum “move” with Harry Kane into those deep areas of playmaking? Can the Spurs really hope to “absorb” this Liverpool team at Anfield?
First against second: as always, this feels like a meeting of angles, trajectories, unanswered questions; and far from the last in this absorbingly shaky season.
