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Loris Karius, who last season was voted the second-best goalkeeper in the Bundesliga, is in a war of words with Gary Neville, who has never been a goalkeeper but is paid to pretend he knows things about goalkeeping on TV.
“[Karius] isn’t good enough. Goalkeepers can transmit anxiety all around the ground, and all through a team. The likes of Karius, that’s what they do - they’re good at it, they’re good at transmitting anxiety,” said Neville, who made 400 appearances at right-back (again, not goalkeeper) for Manchester United, after Liverpool's 4-3 loss to Bournemouth last weekend.
Karius responded in kind, saying, “What critics say right after the game, I don’t know what I think. If you asked them again would they say it now? And I don’t care what Gary Neville said. He was a manager for a short bit and now he is back to being an expert again.”
Neville's managerial career consists of a stint as an assistant for the England National team and a period as Valencia manager in which he was winless in his first nine games and fired after 28.
Jurgen Klopp, who as a manager has won the Bundesliga twice and reached the Champions League final, has entered the fray, guns blazing:
“The pundits, former players most of them, forgot completely how it felt when they got criticised. Especially the Neville brothers; the one who was the manager he obviously should know that too much criticism never helps. But he is not interested in helping a Liverpool player I can imagine, but that makes the things he says not make more sense. He showed he struggled with the job to judge players so why do we let him talk about players on television?”
The annals of stupid punditry are indeed vast, but the Neville brothers have a wing all to themselves. Maybe if Gary Neville had a keeper as good as Loris Karius he would have kept a La Liga clean sheet at Valencia.
