There were special moments for more than one Liverpool player on Sunday.
Curtis Jones, who has not had the best of times this season, scored his first club goal since September 2021 with a volley that was sweet in more ways than one. The clever finish that followed for Liverpool’s second probably tasted even sweeter for Luis Diaz after a long road to recovery from injury.
And on his 300th appearance in a Liverpool jersey, Mohamed Salah scored his 184th goal, moving into sixth place on the club’s all-time scorers’ list. Yet these significant landmarks were reduced to footnotes by the antics and words of Jurgen Klopp.
Not deliberately, of course.
Let’s get a few things straight - there is no manager who is more supportive of his players than Klopp. There is no manager who inspires his players quite like Klopp does. There is no manager who gets what his club means to its players, fans and community better than Klopp does.
He is an inspirational figure … but when it comes to inexcusable treatment of officials, he just cannot help himself. His stomping celebration in the face of fourth official John Brooks after Diogo Jota’s late winner against Spurs was inexcusable. His suggestion that Paul Tierney has some sort of agenda against Liverpool was inexcusable.
In the case of his angry charge towards Brooks, you would like to think effective punishment arrived instantly when he watched himself back on television. Surely, he would have been mortified, not to mention embarrassed as he pulled up lame?
But having done something similar to an assistant referee during a game against Manchester City earlier in the season, Klopp clearly does not sanction himself for his misbehaviour.
(And, again, Klopp is far from the only big-name transgressor on this score. Amidst the praise for City’s thrashing of Arsenal, Pep Guardiola’s harassment of Craig Pawson, the fourth official, was hardly mentioned.)
That is why the Football Association should come down hard on Klopp for his behaviour on the touchline on Sunday … and at least double his punishment for the aspersions he has publicly cast against the integrity of Tierney. The obvious irony of his remarks about Tierney is that Liverpool were the beneficiaries of the referee’s most obvious misjudgement when he failed to dismiss Jota for kicking Oliver Skipp in the head.
But the rights and wrongs of Tierney’s judgments are irrelevant. He is not biased against anyone, full stop. Klopp will be punished but the punishment will be inadequate. What is the worst thing that will happen? Probably, a touchline ban.
But the touchline ban is a cosmetic sanction. Does it really matter if the manager is sitting in the stands? Since when have the FA stopped handing out stadium bans like the one Jose Mourinho got in 2015 for his harassment of Jon Moss?
Touchline bans should be longer, fines heavier and if they don’t work, then ban managers who persistently abuse officials from stadiums.
In the meantime, Klopp might want to reflect on how - no matter how inadvertently - he took a little bit of gloss away from some fine achievements by his players on Sunday. You suspect that would hurt him most.
