The Warm-Up: Is Maurizio getting sacked in the morning?
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Updated 19/02/2019 at 08:39 GMT
Plus: Kloppo faces an old enemy, while Jose Mourinho buffs his CV and a plan really backfires
Chelsea's Italian head coach Maurizio Sarri checks his watch on the touchline during the English FA Cup fifth round football match between Chelsea and Manchester United at Stamford Bridge in London on February 18, 2019.
Image credit: Getty Images
TUESDAY’S BIG STORIES
"F*** Sarriball!"
It’s fair to say that Monday, February 18 was the evening that the patience of many Chelsea fans snapped.
Sure, you could say this is a sad indictment of modern football that supporters are already turning on a manager appointed as part of a long-term vision, less than 1/6th of the way through his contract. But the reason they seem to have ceased cutting Sarri some slack, after a 2-0 schooling by Manchester United that knocked them out of the FA Cup, was that it simply showed them more of the same.
Take a look at these substitutions, for example:
After this, with his team heading out of the cup and his job prospects growing thinner by the minute, Sarri turned to look at his bench, wondering how he could change the pattern of the game. There he saw World Cup winner Olivier Giroud and Callum Hudson-Odoi, a hugely promising and exciting youngster he’s supposed to be attempting to keep sweet, but rather than bring either of them on he chose to replace Cesar Azpilicueta with Davide Zappacosta. Replacing a right-back with a worse right-back should have really been the point where Sarri’s friends staged an intervention.
It didn’t exactly go down well with the crowd…
…who added, more woundingly…
Not that Sarri himself seemed overly fussed: “I am worried about the results. Not about the fans. I can understand the situation and our fans, because the result wasn’t really good. We are out of the FA Cup, so I can understand our fans. But I am worried at the moment about our results.”
Maybe worry about both, big man.
Kloppo braces himself for the old enemy
Jurgen Klopp is apparently a bit more sanguine about Bayern Munich these days. But there was a time when they were his bete noire, not only a team who used to routinely beat his Borussia Dortmund side to trophies, but who would then compound things by nicking their best players.
So he would have been forgiven for getting some pretty harrowing flashbacks when Liverpool were drawn against Bayern in the Champions League, the first leg of which takes place at Anfield tonight.
Still, this is not the Bayern he faced in those latter years of his time in Germany. They’re behind Dortmund in the league having endured a stumbling start under Niko Kovac, but Klopp, perhaps with his former experiences in mind, was careful not to undersell the Bavarian behemoths.
There is no obvious problem. For me, the way I have to see it, it makes them more dangerous. The league is not the situation they want but in this competition they are exactly where they want to be. They will be more focused. Nobody is flying, brain-wise, in Bayern at the moment because they are chasing the league but everything is possible for them. We have to be aware of that.
Still, this might be the first time in a while that Bayern, with an ageing side that will be broken up and replenished in the summer, have entered a Champions League tie at this stage of the tournament and not been favourites. Can Liverpool live up to that? Finding out should be good fun.
Mourinho opens his mind to new career opportunities
Entertaining news from Jose Mourinho now, who is turning the negative of being sacked by Manchester United (albeit with fat stacks of cash in his pay-off) into a positive by expanding his horizons.
“I see myself coaching in France one day,” he told Portuguese newspaper Record. “I’m a man that has worked in four different countries and that likes other cultures. I like to learn a lot and to work in a different league would be a fantastic experience.”
We’re going to take a punt here and suggest that Mourinho isn’t planning to help Guingamp avoid relegation from Ligue 1, so there’s really only one team in France that someone with a Mourinho-sized ego would lower himself to managing. You know, the big one. The one that saunter to the league every season, apart from that one season when they essentially soiled themselves and let Monaco have a crack.
Which is relatively amusing when you consider his remarks from a few years ago, when he was in one of his moods and was trying to take a passive-aggressive swing at former Bayern Munich manager Pep Guardiola.
“For me, I’m not the smartest guy to choose countries and clubs,” he said in 2017. “I could choose another club in another country where becoming the champion is easier.
“Maybe in the future I have to be smarter and choose another club in another country where everybody is champion. Maybe I will go to a country where a kitman can be coach and win the title.”
How are your sock-pairing skills, Jose?
IN OTHER NEWS
Hopefully the Liverpool players manage to free themselves from this lift before the big game…
HEROES AND ZEROS
Hero: Callum Hudson-Odoi
Callum Hudson-Odoi’s agent must be quietly delighted that Maurizio Sarri is picking him. With every minute the young winger spends on the bench, rather than the pitch, his reputation grows and grows, and he doesn’t even have the inconvenience of having to play.
Zero: Pro Piacenza
As detailed in yesterday’s Warm-Up, Italian Serie C2 side Pro Piacenza attempted to avoid expulsion from the league by fielding the exact minimum number of players, leading to a 20-0 shoeing at the hands of Cuneo.
Well, that really backfired, because in their attempts to avoid being expelled from the league, they’ve been expelled from the league.
A league statement read:
We would like to underline, in addition to the conscious, multiple and fraudulent violations performed by Pro Piacenza, the unacceptable behaviour of the club who, mortifying the very essence of sport competition, forced both the people included on their own teamsheet and their opponents’ players to take part in a farcical match from a technical point of view (as well as physically dangerous in the case of those not prepared from a competitive point of view).
The Warm-Up suspects this is one of those instances where a statement actually gains something in translation.
HAT TIP
The atmosphere between Klopp and Bayern changed when Bayern signed some of Dortmund’s best players and wrestled back the initiative. Klopp would then compare them to a James Bond villain hell-bent on global domination, saying they were “like the Chinese – they see what other people are doing and copy it – just with more money,” he said after losing the German Cup final to Bayern in 2013.
Ahead of the big one, have a read of the Independent’s Simon Hughes, writing about Jurgen Klopp’s relationship with Bayern Munich.
RETRO CORNER
The last time – in fact, the only time – Liverpool and Bayern have faced each other in the Champions League/European Cup was in the 1981 semi-final. Liverpool won, but if you skip to about 20 seconds of this clip you can witness perhaps the most outrageous refereeing decision of all time.
COMING UP
Did we mention Liverpool are playing Bayern? If you’re going to be contrary about things, Lyon face Barcelona in the other Champions League game while QPR face West Brom in the Championship and there’s a whole bunch of League One and Two games. Get stuck in.
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