Dancing like Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and watching movies – Jurgen Klopp opens up on quarantine routine
Jurgen Klopp says he has spent his time in self-isolation watching the Taken trilogy and trying to dance like Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain.
The Premier League season is currently on hold until April 30 at the earliest due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The British government has enforced strident measures to try and halt the spread of the virus, insisting that people must stay at home as much as possible.
And while Klopp is desperate for football to return, he has called on the public to be “disciplined” in the wider fight against COVID-19.
"I didn’t cut the grass but I tried the dance of Ox!” he told Liverpool’s official website when asked what he has been doing.
"Not as bad as you probably think! It’s very important in these times that we all show we take this situation seriously, but we are human beings. At the moment we are at home and when you are at home, you cannot do something to help outside.
"We are not health workers, we don’t work in a supermarket. You have to keep your own mood up and you have to keep the mood up for other people.
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“If the boys do anything on Instagram, as long as it’s in a legal frame I’m overly happy about it – it just shows they are still cheeky and all that stuff. I like it, I like it a lot. I like the line-ups they do. All these things are really funny. It’s good.
"I watched a few movies – I watched the Taken trilogy again! To be honest, that’s how it is – you do a lot of things you usually don’t do. I’m still in that period. Two weeks is long but it’s not that long."
"We said it now often enough, and I think everybody knows, football is not the most important thing in the world. One hundred per cent not. In this moment it’s clear what is.
"But the only way to get football back as soon as possible, if that’s what the people want, the more disciplined we are now the earlier we will get, piece by piece by piece, our life back. That’s how it is. There is no other solution in the moment, nobody has another solution.
"We have to be disciplined by ourselves, we have to keep the distance to other people. We can still do some things, not a lot, but we have to just calm down a little bit with things. Yes, outside the economy has to carry on, that will start again.
"But the lower the number will be when we go out again, the number of people infected, that’s what I understand, the better it is. It will not be like nobody anymore after the next few weeks but the curve will flatten, that’s the most important thing.
"We have to give our people in the hospitals, our doctors, the chance to treat the people with serious issues with full concentration. We have to give people time to build ventilators, we have to give people time to find solutions.
"There will be a moment when other smart people find a vaccine for the virus. But until then, we have to make sure we do the best possible for all the people out there. You hear now more and more it’s not only the elderly and weaker - it’s not only that, there are younger people involved who can die of it as well.
"It’s not about that, it’s about just, show heart and a bit of sensibility and do the right thing: stay at home as long as we have to.
“And then at one point we will play football again as well, 100%. I couldn’t wish more for it because of a few really good reasons, how you can imagine. I can’t wait actually, but even I have to be disciplined and I try to be as much as I can."
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Greg Lea is a freelance football journalist who's filled in wherever FourFourTwo needs him since 2014. He became a Crystal Palace fan after watching a 1-0 loss to Port Vale in 1998, and once got on the scoresheet in a primary school game against Wilfried Zaha's Whitehorse Manor (an own goal in an 8-0 defeat).