Jurgen Klopp within his rights to rest key players in FA Cup - the sad truth is it's a competition that has lost its lustre
Journo - Paul Hayward
8 JANUARY 2019 • 12:45 PM
Watching the FA Cup fourth-round draw and reflecting on the ‘giantkilling’ by Newport, Gillingham and Oldham induced a nostalgic glow for a tradition that has been rebuilt as a vehicle for overseas television rights. This third round was a four-day Football Association boxset, sold around the world to fund artificial pitches.
In its soul, the FA Cup is still a lot more than a costume drama with overseas sales potential ($1bn, over six years). It gleams in our deepest memories. A refuge for social mobility, it connects the outposts with the powerhouses in a month (January) short of romance and thrills. There ends the homily, because it also got in the way of Liverpool trying to win the league for the first time in 29 years, which is why Jurgen Klopp used players aged 16, 17 and 18 at Wolves - and sent a signal to his squad that he could live without a day trip to Wembley in May.
Klopp loved the German Cup, the DFB-Pokal, but is known to be less keen on the English knock-out system, which foists not one but two Cup competitions on the 92 league clubs. In England, we expect foreign managers to obey a culture that makes no sense to them, and which sometimes hinders them in their grander aims. We want the FA Cup to be sacrosanct but we also think we can hammer Klopp if he plays his first XI in rounds three and four and Liverpool’s league form suffers.
There is a long pattern now of fielding weakened teams in FA Cup third rounds. Liverpool are only the most high-profile culprits. Klopp’s team, remember, lost at Manchester City on Thursday night and saw their league lead cut to four points. Four days after that defeat, which closed an intense Christmas schedule, we expect Liverpool to start Virgil van Dijk and Mohamed Salah in the third most important competition they are in?
Man City fans seized on Klopp’s borderline surrender against Wolves to recite their line-up of stars in the 7-0 win over Rotherham. But the comparison is flawed. Four points back in the league, City have a greater incentive to remain active in the FA Cup, in case Liverpool cannot be caught. Pep Guardiola, meanwhile, made eight changes from the Liverpool game; Klopp’s were merely more draconian. Finally, and most importantly, City are not on a quest that’s being framed by the outside world like the holy grail: a first English championship since 1990, before the Premier League was invented
Against that backdrop Liverpool prioritising the League and Champions League is professional conscientiousness, not disrespect for a competition that was on the skids long before Klopp arrived from Germany. Playing both semi-finals at Wembley to help meet a grievous construction bill was perhaps the biggest of many blows to the Cup’s aura. The spreading of third-round games last weekend kept us fed for four days but diluted the tension. Even the most obsessive football addict could not care about the third round continuously for four whole days, across six different kick-off times, chosen for overseas consumption.
Like it or not, the FA Cup is now an optional target. Brighton, Liverpool’s opponents on Saturday, look safe in 13th place, but summoned six or seven non-first-XI players for their Cup win at Bournemouth. They all do it. The policy for most managers is to try win a Cup game but not risk damage to the season by throwing everything at it. Some fringe players appear less than delighted to be given this task (Daniel Sturridge, at Liverpool). Others will maybe use the chance to make a point to the manager and thus earn you a place in the next-round.
If Liverpool are overtaken in the last two furlongs of this title race, few of their fans will cast their minds back to a January 7 trip to Wolves and lament the missed opportunity to win the FA Cup. Amusingly, people speak of Klopp’s weakened side as if the FA were trying to hand him the trophy and he turned his back. There are five more rounds to go. Granted, Liverpool threw away their chance of winning rounds four, five, six, and a semi-final and final, but to assume they would do so is quite a leap.
Equally the accusation that Klopp is spurning “trophies” is the wrong way round. He is saying no to the easier pursuit of a cup in favour of the harder one of winning the league. A manager with an eye on his reputation would give in to public pressure so he could say he had won a trophy - any trophy - at Anfield. Instead the starting line-up at Wolves expressed indifference to external noise. Liverpool’s job is to win the league. Everything else is subservient to that dream.
Anyway, romance was not given the whole night off. The debut of Ki-Jana Hoever, their 16-year-old centre-back, was worth the admission price. Rafael Camacho and Curtis Jones were also worth a look. In May, the FA Cup will probably be won by a top-six club who feel they need a trophy, and rotated strategically to protect their league position while also giving themselves a chance of doing a Wembley jig. Each to their own. We can’t have it all ways.
