Jurgen Klopp’s treatment of one Liverpool player left him feeling hard done by after the defender was used as a makeshift striker by the former Reds manager
Former Liverpool star Steven Caulker once said he felt Jurgen Klopp treated him harshly during his time on Merseyside.
Caulker, who turns 33 today, December 29, was a surprise arrival on loan at Anfield in the January of 2016, just a matter of months after the legendary German manager had replaced Brendan Rodgers at the Premier League giants.
The defender, who was on the books at Queens Park Rangers, had a loan at Southampton cancelled, which allowed him to become one of the first signings of the Klopp era. But at the time he was struggling with gambling and alcohol addictions, demons which had followed him throughout his career.
The centre-back’s arrival at Anfield caught even him off guard as he’d been drinking heavily the night before, then came straight into the Reds squad for their Premier League clash with Arsenal only 24 hours later – when he replaced Adam Lallana as an auxiliary striker in the 87th minute.
“Monday I signed, Tuesday I trained and then Wednesday was the game,” he recalled on the Under The Cosh podcast. “I was s***ing myself and thought, ‘I’m gonna start here’ because they had seven centre-halves out injured.
“And I was thinking, ‘Oh my god, I’m going to start. Am I even sober? How the f*** am I going to do this?’ I was panicking. That train journey up, I was panicking because I hadn’t been taking care of myself, I was a mess. I was worried.”
After all that, Caulker didn’t start, with Klopp playing Kolo Toure and Mamadou Sakho instead. But with Arsenal winning 3-2 in the dying embers, he got the call from Klopp, who explained he wasn’t coming on in defence but rather up front.
“I was like, ‘What’,” continued Caulker. “I didn’t get time to ask him and we ended up getting the equaliser and after the game he just came over high-fiving me [and saying] that, ‘They all think you’re crazy until it works’.”
Caulker would be used twice more as a makeshift striker substitute, at home against Manchester United and away against Norwich City – the latter when he entered the match up front in the 90th minute, contributing to a 95th-minute winner by Lallana. But he had only one other appearance in his preferred position.
Caulker was set to start in an FA Cup replay against West Ham. But he explained how back spasms led him to tell Klopp he couldn’t feature. “I was devastated, and from that moment on, he wrote me off,” Caulker claimed.
“I think he wrote me off as one of those guys who didn’t want to play or who was scared to play. It couldn’t have been further from the truth.
“That was it; my moment was gone. As soon as that went, and I felt it go because then he started putting me in the U23s to play every week, I was like, ‘Nah, that’s not on.’ You see it all the time; the manager just goes, ‘You’re not for me; out you go; get down with the kids.'”