Former Manchester United and Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho took aim at old rival Jurgen Klopp for the way his Liverpool side approached their Champions League final win over Tottenham.
The Reds won 2-0 in Madrid to lift the European Cup for the sixth time in their history, with an early goal from Mohamed Salah and a late one from Divock Origi enough to settle this all-Premier League contest.
MORE: Video: Divock Origi explains how he went from bench-warmer to Liverpool’s Champions League hero
However, this was certainly not a vintage Liverpool performance, with Klopp’s side looking a little rusty for much of the game, though they were solid at the back and didn’t really concede too many clear cut chances to Spurs either.
Mourinho himself might have been proud of such a performance, with the Portuguese tactician perhaps more well known for cautious performances like this than Klopp is.
LFC fans might not take too well to the former Man Utd boss essentially claiming Klopp used those kinds of tactics to beat Tottenham.
‘I think the three midfield players of Liverpool, if we’re going to see a wave of their positioning, they played on a straight line in front of the back four,’ Mourinho told beIN Sports, as quoted by the Metro.
‘You don’t remember Henderson, Wijnaldum, Fabinho, Milner to be close to the three attacking players to have one arrival in the box. Nothing. They stayed with a block of seven, they were very pragmatic, they were very solid defensively.
35.4% – Liverpool (35.4%) have become the first side to win the Champions League final despite having less possession than the opposition since Jose Mourinho’s Inter Milan beat Bayern Munich in 2010, also in Madrid. Masterplan. #UCLfinal pic.twitter.com/cuydtDvbbQ
— OptaJoe (@OptaJoe) June 1, 2019
‘And when Tottenham managed to do something and create something, the player who was missing last season [the goalkeeper] was there today.
‘He [Alisson] was not phenomenal, he didn’t have five, six, seven, eight saves, but he had a couple of saves which stopped Tottenham drawing.
‘I think that if this match was not the Champions League final, if it’s a Premier League match, the final of the League Cup, we would all say the game was not good.’