Virgil van Dijk received a ban for the way he spoke to a referee and after Erling Haaland’s outburst on an off the pitch against Tottenham, Jurgen Klopp has been asked for his thoughts.
Speaking with the press (via the Liverpool ECHO), the German responded to questions about whether the forward should be banned: “I don’t know, in most of the years the thing Virgil said no one would have recognised. [He said] ‘F****** joke’ wasn’t it? I have no idea exactly what Haaland said, I didn’t follow it.
“It is like it is. To be honest I didn’t think for a second about it, when I heard about it, it wasn’t ‘oh we get it, they don’t.’
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“As long as you are not emotionally involved it is much easier to accept it, in the heat of the moment it is more difficult. They would have probably thought about it and I have no opinion on the outcome.”
It was obvious that our manager wasn’t going to start calling for another team’s player to be banned and this was quite a provocative line of questioning from the reporter.
However, it does reveal a clear annoyance (or at the very least, surprise) around the fact that our captain saw his red card ban extended for the way in which he spoke to an official.
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It wasn’t just the Norwegian striker for Manchester City either and it’ll be interesting to see whether several of them are charged with offences, that seem clearly worse than anything our No.4 did.
Then again though, this is the Premier League where consistency never seems to be in place and like the waving of cards to officials – maybe this is just another rule change that has been swiftly forgotten.
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