Sadly for Jürgen Klopp, who was in characteristically showman-like form, the German expression did not quite translate. “One comes to the other,” the Borussia Dortmund manager said, to blank looks all round. The club’s head of communications stepped in to offer clarity. “In Germany,” he said, “we say that everything has an end but only the sausage has two ends.”
None of his English-speaking audience understood but, by then, nobody really cared. Klopp was trying to explain how Dortmund’s injury crisis was akin to a vicious circle, how one thing has led to another and the theme certainly continued on Saturday, when the star winger Marco Reus tore ankle ligaments at Paderborn to return to the ranks of the wounded.
But it was knock-about theatre and it chimed neatly with the assertion that Klopp had made midway through his press conference before Wednesday night’s Champions League tie against Arsenal at the Emirates Stadium. “This is a little bit like a holiday situation for me,” he said.
Dortmund are flying in Group D, with four wins from four ties and qualification for the last 16 already assured; the only outstanding issue is whether they can advance as the group winners, which Klopp very much wants to do. The last time that Dortmund opened a group stage with three victories, they went on to win the competition in 1996-97.
But the club’s Bundesliga form has been the stuff of nightmares and with three wins from 12 matches and a position of third-bottom in the table, Klopp is feeling the heat. Not necessarily from the club’s board or their fans but from himself. He demands better than this.
Dortmund have sleep-walked through most of the domestic season, with horrible lapses undermining them at regular intervals. A case in point was the second-half performance at newly promoted Paderborn. Leading 2-0 at the interval, Dortmund contrived to draw 2-2. At the beginning of the month, they had led 1-0 at Bayern Munich after the first-half. They would lose 2-1.
“In our last four matches [in all competitions], we have played six very good halves and two very bad,” Klopp said. “The two bad ones were enough to lose the games.”
Dortmund did not actually lose at Paderborn but it had felt like a defeat. Klopp hopes that the Champions League can bring liberation and the opportunity to drive some sort of momentum ahead of the return to Bundesliga hostilities at Eintracht Frankfurt on Sunday. It is easy to see the parallels to Arsenal – beyond all of the injuries. The London club are desperate for a tonic after their own rocky patch.
“We have real pressure,” Klopp said. “Maybe not in this competition, although we want to go through in first position but in the Bundesliga. It is a problem of concentration, of misunderstanding of the situation and we have to work further on this to be better.
“I cannot change the Bundesliga situation here so as I say, we are holiday. It is only the Champions League! But the Bundesliga comes back on Sunday. We have pressure. At the moment, it is not with the crowd and with the club, it is the pressure that I put on myself. But that is more than enough.
“In our situation, we need each game to get more stability and we have to use this game [against Arsenal] for the Bundesliga. We need stability, that is our big problem until now. If we can play very good, it will help us for the Bundesliga.”
Usually, there has been criticism from the top of the club, with the chief executive, Hans-Joachim Watzke, saying at the annual stockholders’ meeting on Monday that it was incumbent on the players to dig deeper to find the solution.
“The criticism from the big boss was accepted,” Neven Subotic, the central defender, said. “He does not say a lot [in public] but when he does, it’s always of the utmost importance. This was the case on Monday and we will take that to heart.”
Klopp, who is under contract at Dortmund until 2018, has often been linked with a move to the Premier League and he has said that as his other language is English, he might be suited to working in England. “For my type of coaching, I need the language,” he said.
But Klopp also spoke of the “unfinished business” he had at Dortmund. “I don’t think about my future at this moment,” he said. “I was asked [last week] about what I might do after Dortmund. I said it was possible that if somebody called me, then we could talk about it. But that is all. Timing is very important in each part of life.
“This is unfinished business with Dortmund at this moment. This is a real big challenge. I feel the maximum of responsibility for this. It is easy to feel responsible for winning games but it is much more difficult to handle this feeling now. I try to do my best, to handle the problems we have and get better results. This is real hard work at this moment.”