Alan Shearer has accused Jurgen Klopp and his Manchester United counterpart, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, of “pantomime” and “nonsense” after drawing attention to heavy-handed challenges in their respective games.
This comes from The Athletic, with the former England international justifying Burnley’s tactics by suggesting that Sean Dyche’s men have little other way of combatting the fluid football of the likes of Liverpool and other top sides.
The Reds ran out 2-0 winners at Anfield ultimately, taking six points from their opening two league games.
It’s difficult to imagine that the likes of Shearer, Gary Lineker, Jermaine Jenas and co. have genuinely watched the full clash between Liverpool and Burnley given the video examples running about on Twitter proving Klopp’s comments.
At least, we either have to accept that they haven’t watched the game or that any sort of nuance in the sport has completely vanished.
While we at the EOTK can appreciate the need to scrounge up some kind of advantage to try and counter an objectively better side, it’s difficult to identify how certain grappling challenges issued by our opposition last weekend were vaguely reminiscent of ‘football’.