31-year-old says he wasn’t happy with what Klopp did to him when he was at Liverpool

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Former Liverpool defender Steven Caulker says Jurgen Klopp unfairly ‘wrote him off’ during his stint at Anfield.

Caulker was signed as an emergency centre-back on-loan from Southampton in January 2016. An incredibly surprising move at the time, the then 24-year-old went on to play just four times for the Reds. And now, speaking to Under The Cosh, the Sierra Leone international has suggested that Klopp never gave him a chance.

“Things did change for two months. I’ve gone there, it’s the chance of a lifetime, I was white-knuckling it. I didn’t know how to deal with my addiction, I was somehow dealing with it because I wanted the opportunity. But the opportunity never came,” Caulker said. “I had a couple of run outs up-front, played one game as centre-halve, did alright, against West Ham.

“We then had the cup replay against West Ham and I’d done my back in, horrible spasms, I couldn’t get rid of it. The morning of the game I’ve had to tell him I can’t play. I was due to start but I said I actually can’t play. I was devastated, and from that moment on he wrote me off. 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.'”

Caulker fails to earn Liverpool chance

This is just a snippet of a really interesting chat with Caulker. But listening to the rest of the conversation, you can’t really feel all that sorry for him here.

First things first, when the former Tottenham man gets the call that Liverpool want him, he claims that he was passed out drunk on a floor in Dublin. Struggling with various addictions at the time, it was clear that Caulker needed help. He certainly wasn’t fit to be playing for Liverpool.

As a result, you can understand exactly where Klopp was coming from here. Injury or no injury, it’s unlikely that Caulker’s extra-curricular habits hadn’t filtered back to Jurgen.

The German rightly places a great deal of stock in the kind of characters he has around the squad. If he’s not sure about a player’s behaviour then they won’t stick around for long. In Caulker’s case, Jurgen probably saw straight through him.

You can extend some sympathy towards the defender for the fact that he was never really given his chance to impress. But at a club like Liverpool you’ve really got to earn that chance. Despite his claims otherwise, it’s fair to say that Caulker never did that.

Maybe it was harsh to put the one-cap England international with the youngsters, but Klopp wouldn’t have done that without cause. It would be interesting to hear the boss’ side of the story on this one…