Borussia Dortmund might pull off a surprise.
But it’s unlikely.
Serie A leaders Juventus should walk it.
Dortmund have had a wretched season, mainly because of injuries, I think, but they\’ve won their last three and now sit 12th in the Bundesliga.
I\’ve loved Klopp\’s enthusiasm, his infectious enjoyment, his underdog\’s desire to topple the big boys of Bayern.
The blond, explosive Marco Reus is the star the biggest clubs all want this summer.
OK, I admit the lad made the wrong kind of headlines last year. He\’d already been stopped by five times for speeding since 2011 and in December his Aston Martin was stopped again and the police finally realised he\’d been driving without a license.
Reus, 25, had never passed his test. He admitted he’d been stupid.
The authorities decided to give him a record fine for a motoring offence: £427,000. That\’s about three months wages.
Paul Pogba, 21, was one of a group of young black players at Man United who were asking for silly money before they\’d done anything.
So Sir Alex made a strategic decision to let them all go to save himself a lot of brain damage in the future. One of the other talents was Ravel Morrison.
If Ferguson, Harry Redknapp and Sam Allardyce, three of the most proven man-managers in the history of football, couldn\’t control Ravel, other managers will not bother trying.
By contrast, Pogba has worked hard and become one of France\’s best midfielders.
One other thing about Dortmund. They\’ve been at the bottom of the table all season, with a lot of problems, trying to play their whirlwind style of attacking football with a different eleven every week.
But it wasn\’t just down to injuries.
It took me five months to figure this out and I\’ve been meaning to mention it for two.
Borussia Dortmund miss Robert Lewandowski terribly.
Because Lewandowski was the super-versatile and selfless pivot who held their attack together better than any other centre forward in Europe could have done.
He\’s six two and two-footed and super-strong and good in the air and he can go wide, open it up, play runners in.
Lewandowski was their anchorman, their hinge, their pivot, and there\’s no other footballer who could give as much precision to all the different types of passes needed to sustain the momentum of their attacks and create all the moves and goals that won two league titles and wrote history.
In one spell Dortmund beat Bayern in five consecutive games- that\’s what I call rattling their cage.
Lewa once scored four goals against Real Madrid in the Champions League and those goals alone demonstrated his range of skills. Nobody else at the club could do what he did and nobody they could buy now can do all the things he did.
Reluctantly, while knowing that football success is always down to a lot of little things rather than one thing, I\’ve still concluded that Klopp\’s thrilling style of play can never be as reliable or penetrating as it was from 2010 to 2014.
But Klopp’s comment on Juventus is interesting: “They play a top game at a slow pace.”
PS. Love that remark by the socially democratic Mats Hummels, who said some words Pogba and Morrison would never have uttered: “We earn enough at Dortmund.â€
24th February 2015