I’m Not Sweating The Coaching Carousel
Around every transfer window, we always go through the usual player carousel. Which player is going to come in, who’s on the outs, all of that. This year, we have the added consternation of wondering who our next coach is going to be, adding to the madness. In my 30 years of being a sports fan, I’ve never seen the hype for who’s going to replace a coach as rabid as it is with who is replacing Jurgen Klopp. But honestly, I’m not worried about it.
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Personal Track Record
Perhaps it’s my years of following teams with legacies of failure (Padres, Florida Panthers, and the Chargers before they moved to LA) or my brief time as a NASCAR fan, but I’ve grown a callus to that hype and don’t buy into it. In the former case, I’ve seen players super-hyped only to come to those respective teams and just tank.
In the latter, I’ve seen the rumor mill or carousel just as hyped. Driver A’s going to this team with this sponsorship. This team’s merging with that team, etc. Consequently, I have almost ZERO player jerseys in my closet. I’m more about the team and not the player because of my inability to grasp the hype. And if they tank, I don’t want that stench on my back and be out the exorbitant amount of money that jerseys cost these days. But that’s just my opinion.
Being a Liverpool fan, I’ve seen that hype too. There was enthusiasm around Virgil before we finally got him. The same goes for guys like Naby Keita, Takumi Minamino, and recently the whole Lavia and Caicedo transfer saga.
Of those players I just listed, only one of them has lived up to the hype, that being Virgil. Keita was woefully underperforming and injury-prone and Minamino was awesome for us when we won the Carabao & FA Cups but still struggled at least from a cultural standpoint owing to Covid. Then you have the Lavia and Caicedo saga earlier this season.
Don’t Let The Carousel Disappoint You
I’ll admit: I got caught up in that nonsense before Chelsea ended up countering and got the aforementioned duo. And it sucked we didn’t get them AT THE TIME. But as sports is an escape from the mundane reality, I quickly reconciled those feelings and told myself that we are gonna be fine. If we were meant to get them, we would’ve gotten them. For even saying that, I was told I was “settling for less,” and other personal jabs aimed at me. The way the season has played out has vindicated my calmness after the dust settled; even with injuries and a few bad results recently, it’s been a season with an up arrow.
It’s the same for not getting Xabi as a manager. It does suck that he probably won’t be coming. I’m not gonna lie. But we’d be getting him for the nostalgia factor and not because he’s the right fit for our system. From a NASCAR perspective, it’d be like the never-ending rumor of hearing Dale Earnahardt Jr. driving his dad’s old #3 car (which never happened).
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We’re gonna get whoever we are gonna get. I’ll take a no-name manager who gets us a treble of some variation over a highly promised manager that doesn’t even get us into the Europa Conference League. Ultimately, we can’t bank on solely nostalgia and familiarity when it comes to the hiring process, as it seems we do every season when players like Bellingham and Mbappe are so often spitballed as coming.
Make no mistake: whoever replaces Klopp will have some big shoes to fill and a legacy that will be hard to replace. Only time will tell if we made the right decision. We may struggle out of the gates. But at the same time, those early struggles might involve some hardware at the end. The stakes are high, and I understand that we want someone to come in and win almost out of the gates. But this club has seen darker days than this and from a personal perspective, I’ve seen worse. I’m not worried. Keep the faith.
