Times journalist Paul Joyce has produced an excellent season review, and we encourage you all to follow this link and check it out.
It highlights Jurgen Klopp’s role both in the dressing room and on the training field, how he handled the Coutinho saga and other unpublicised elements that impacted our campaign.
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Klopp finally discusses impact of Buvac exit
But one of the parts which interested us most was about Zeljko Buvac, Liverpool’s former assistant manager who left a few weeks ago, just before the second leg of our Champions League semi-final with Roma.
His exit was suspicious because nobody at the club explained the reason, made all the odder by its terrible timing.
But it turns out Klopp and Buvac’s relationship had reached boiling point – and was visible during our drab 0-0 draw with Stoke City at the end of April.
Joyce wrote:
“Injuries to Oxlade-Chamberlain, Joe Gomez, Joël Matip and Emre Can leave resources stretched, while there has been the ill-timed loss of the assistant manager Zeljko Buvac and the breaking of a 17-year bond for “personal reasons”. Buvac had become increasingly distant and at half-time of the draw against Stoke City last month he did not even study the half-time video clips with Klopp as normal, choosing instead to sit on his own in another part of the dressing room.”
For the pair to be rowing halfway through what was almost a must-win match is crazy, and shows the deterioration of their relationship.
And for Joyce to put ‘personal reasons’ in speech-marks implies that the issue was between the pair rather than anything outside of football.
We hope that it can be fixed at some point, but have the Champions League Final on Saturday to worry about first.