Real Madrid and Liverpool meet for the Champions League in Paris, the final will be played this Saturday, May 28, starting at 3:00 p.m. and the venue for the duel will be the Stade de France in Saint-Denis.
On the merengue side, Carlo Ancelotti, winner of two European Cups as a footballer and three as a coach, assured that the feelings and emotions are stronger when winning the title as a coach because they feel more responsibilities.
«When you win you feel that you have won the most important competition, that you have done your job well. It is different to win it as a coach than as a player. The feelings, the emotions, are different. They are stronger when you win as a trainer. As a player, you are part of the group that wins the trophy, but as a coach you have more responsibilities,” he told Uefa.
Ancelotti has before him the chance to make history if he beats Liverpool. He would become the coach with the most ‘Champions’ conquered. “I’ve thought about it. Many years have passed since the first time. Football has changed and I have known how to adapt to those changes. From the first final in 2003 until today there have been many changes. They have been positive changes. Football is always a very interesting show, and I adapt to changes because I am passionate about this sport.
The Italian coach does not attach importance to the desire for revenge expressed by ‘Mo’ Salah in the reunion in the final, four years later, of the same protagonists from kyiv. “Real Madrid is also looking for revenge because it lost a final against Liverpool in Paris. I don’t think that means much. Two great teams will face each other and the one with the most courage and personality will win in the end.”
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On the English side, with a half smile, Jürgen Klopp admitted the innate loser condition that has accompanied him throughout his career. “I’m used to being second,” said the strategist. He saw him lose six finals in a row between 2012 and 2019 and that placed him as the cursed coach of world football.
A streak that died at the Wanda Metropolitano, in the Champions League final that Liverpool beat Tottenham Hotspur and with which Klopp put an end to seven years of waiting. But this does not imply that the German has forgotten those times and he remembered that fame by losing the Premier League by a single point, despite adding 92 units, a figure with which he would have been champion in any other league.
“I think I still have the record with Mainz of being the team that scored the most points and failed to go up,” acknowledged Klopp, whose curse began precisely in the Champions League, but when he was managing Borussia Dortmund.
The Germans were crowned Bundesliga champions in 2011 and 2012, in addition to adding a German Cup that last year, but it was in 2013, at Wembley, when he had the icing on the cake within his reach. A final that those from Dortmund reached after sweeping Real Madrid with Robert Lewandowski’s poker, but in which the figure was Arjen Robben, who removed all the ghosts of his career with the goal that crowned Bayern Munich. That lost final was accompanied the following year by the German Cup, in 2014, and also in 2015. There he threw in the towel with the Germans, left in the summer of 2015 and waited for the Liverpool bench door to open. opened a few months later.
With the ‘Reds’ came three other disappointments. The first, the League Cup in 2016, against Manchester City still managed by Manuel Pellegrini, the second, the Europa League that Sevilla snatched from them in Basel, and the third and most important, the Champions League in Kyiv, against Real Madrid.
EFE
