The lauding of Klopp's Liverpool progress will count for little if they don't win the Champions League

The lauding of Klopp's Liverpool progress will count for little if they don't win the Champions League

The Reds must seize the moment in Kiev and improve their manager's dreadful record in major finals.

GAMES like Saturday’s don’t come along very often, and most careers never feature the opportunity to get this close to club football’s biggest prize.

It must be quite the thing to see that trophy up close, to glance at it out of the corner of your eye as you walk past it, but not to touch it before you’ve earned it, oh no. Gennaro Gattuso’s brief caress of the previous trophy pre-kick-off in Istanbul in 2005 is still spoken about in Liverpool circles. It’s now called the previous trophy because that particular one resides at Anfield, Liverpool’s property after a fifth European Cup win. Gattuso got no further than first base with it.

A fifth win. It sounds a lot but really it isn’t. Twenty-one years went by between the club’s number four and number five, encompassing that entire barren period of the 1990s and only ending in the most bizarre, ridiculous fashion and with a team that no-one saw achieving what they did until they actually achieved it. Two years on from that Liverpool were in the final again in Athens. Wiser, stronger, certainly made up of better players, and they lost.

But football’s innate ability to ignore logic is something Liverpool have traded upon during these years when they’ve found attempts to clamber back upon their domestic perch have left them frustrated at every turn. It is Europe that has kept them relevant, and always kept them hanging around in conversations about the biggest and the best and the boldest and the bravest.

Jurgen Klopp – who said at Monday’s press conference that if you Google ‘European nights’ all you see in the results are Liverpool, and was right – has harnessed that through a team now playing in his image. They fight for everything and don’t seem to want to experience a victory unless it has been earned by the donation of every last drop of their sweat. They have all experienced tough times in a relative sense, and that seems to come through in their play. There’s a real joy at having found themselves at the level they are at now, but also an understanding of how far they’ve come.

And it really is prevalent through the entire team. Every one of Klopp’s likely starting XI on Saturday night have been written off or suffered a serious setback along the way. Off the pitch there’s Virgil van Dijk’s teenage abdomen problems which threatened his football career before it really began, and then the young Andrew Robertson’s despair at being without a job when it seemed as though professional football wasn’t going to be for him just six years ago.

On the field there are Red redemption stories in the careers of Loris Karius, Dejan Lovren, Jordan Henderson, James Milner, Roberto Firmino, Mo Salah and more. The latter’s being the most spectacular of course, but look at Milner. He was pressed into service as a left-back last season and then almost mocked for wanting to take his chances back in midfield for this one. He didn’t have the legs, couldn’t cover the ground required and would have been lucky if he got 10 games. At 32, he’ll line up in Kiev as Liverpool’s most important midfield player.

Yet nothing is won yet. These stories do not have their happy ending and there is a real danger that they won’t get one. Real are the masters of this, of course. The 12-time European champions, the winners in three of the last four seasons, the great big boss on the final level of the computer game that you’ve going to have to throw everything at to beat.

And you can’t beat them with stories. They don’t care that Robertson was working at a Glasgow M&S in 2013, or that Jose Mourinho didn’t have much time for Salah, or that a large number of Liverpool fans have spent much of this season wondering if Trent Alexander-Arnold, Gini Wijnaldum and Sadio Mane were actually any good. It’s about the result now.

That’s why Klopp doesn’t get his underdog story.

He’s been here before with Dortmund of course, and has a troubling recent record of seeing his teams fall short in finals. No-one will celebrate how far he has come if there are white ribbons on that trophy on Saturday night.

It is his job to make sure there are red ones, and to make Saturday night one for the ages.

If he can do that – and make no mistake, he can do that – then this will be a team remembered for generations, an achievement sang about across the globe.

These moments don’t come along very often.

Now to take them.

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