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Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp has said he was reduced to tears by video footage of people singing You’ll Never Walk Alone to medical staff in a hospital with patients being treated during the coronavirus pandemic.
With Liverpool just two wins away from sealing the club’s first league title since 1990, there is now doubt as to when, or if, Klopp’s team will be able to play the remaining games of the Premier League season in order to confirm themselves as champions.
But with football suspended in England until April 30 at the earliest, at a time when the country is one of many experiencing social lockdown, Klopp, an in an interview with the club website, spoke of how he has been moved by the reaction of society with the National Health Service (NHS) being placed under increasing strain by the spread of the COVID-19 virus.
“My English is not good enough to say. It’s extraordinary, it’s great,” Klopp said. “I think yesterday I was sent a video of people in the hospital just outside the intensive care area and when they started singing You’ll Never Walk Alone, I started crying immediately.
“It’s unbelievable. But it shows everything, these people not only work but they have such a good spirit.
“They are used to helping other people, we need to get used to it because usually we have our own problems and stuff.
“But it’s their job, they do it day in and day out. They bring themselves, if you want, in danger because they help ill, sick and seriously handicapped people, so I couldn’t admire them more and appreciate it more, I really couldn’t.”
With Liverpool 25 points clear of second-placed Manchester City at the top of the Premier League, with nine games left to play, it had appeared to be merely a matter of time before Anfield hosted its first title party in 30 years.
But with the league closing down two weeks ago, less than 48 hours after Liverpool’s Champions League elimination at the hands of Atletico Madrid, Klopp said that nobody now knows when football will resume.
“We had a lot of things to talk about, a lot of things to think about, things I never thought before in my life about,” Klopp said.
“Nobody knew exactly — and nobody knows exactly — how it will go on, so the only way we could do was to organise it as good as possible for the boys and make sure everything is sorted as much as we can sort it in our little space, in the little area where we are responsible, really.
“That’s what we did in a very short time, then we sent the boys home, went home ourselves and here we are still.
“We played the Bournemouth game on Saturday, we won it, then Sunday City lost, so the information for us was ‘two wins to go.
“But then on Monday morning, I woke up and heard about the situation in Madrid, that they would close the schools and universities from Wednesday, so it was really strange to prepare for that game, to be honest.
“I usually don’t struggle with things around me, I can build barriers right and left when I prepare for a game, but in that moment it was really difficult.
“Wednesday we had the game, I loved the game, I loved what I saw from the boys, it was a really, really good performance other than the result – we didn’t score enough, we conceded too many, that’s all clear, but between these two main pieces of information it was a brilliant game!
“Thursday [we were] off and then Friday when we arrived it was already clear this is not a session. Yes, we trained, but it was more of a meeting.”