The Warm-Up: Could Karius have been good for Liverpool? We may never know

Football has a great many unanswerable questions. Alan Pardew, for example. One of them is surely Loris Karius’s career, and more specifically just how good he could have been.

When Liverpool signed him back in 2016, he was a promising young goalie who had impressed for a couple of years at Mainz and, while he hadn’t won a cap for Germany, that sort of thing was understandable given the competition in his way. He clearly had talent, and eventually worked his way into the Liverpool side, winning a starting berth in the 2018 Champions League final.

Which is where it all started to go wrong. At the time, it was tempting to wonder exactly how anyone could recover from such a traumatic experience, from committing not one but two errors that would on their own send anyone into a pit of swirling despair. The emotional weight of something like that would surely follow someone around for the rest of their lives, and almost certainly irreparably damage their career.

Perhaps Karius will one day recover to be a decent keeper, but that day isn’t now. Karius announced on Monday that he had terminated his loan deal with Besiktas, essentially because they hadn’t been paying his wages, meaning he is left in a double limbo of being a Liverpool player with absolutely no prospect of playing for Liverpool, and a footballer without any football to play.

“It’s a shame it comes to an end like this but you should know that I have tried everything to solve this situation without any problems,” Karius said on Instagram.

“I was very patient for months telling the board over and over again. Same things happened already last year. Unfortunately they haven’t tried to solve this situational problem and even refused my suggestion to help by taking a pay cut.

How good could Karius have been? We’ll never really know. That night in Kiev two years ago almost certainly put paid to that.

The Warm-Up recently had a disagreement with our better half about Wayne Rooney. Incredulity was expressed that Rooney should have a column in the Sunday Times, a paper of intellectual record, when clearly Rooney was a great big thicky dum dum who couldn’t possibly have anything intelligent to say that would match the Times readers’ expectations. We argued that while Rooney might not come across as the sort of intellectual who could hold their own in a debate about Camus or explain complex geopolitical concepts, he nevertheless possessed a different sort of intelligence, a football intelligence, and with a bit of finessing and ghostwriting, could produce some very readable and smart columns for the Times. Essentially, what we were arguing was that it’s unfair to label all footballers as irredeemably stupid.

Safe to say we won’t be mentioning Salomon Kalou in our next discussion along these lines.

Kalou has been suspended by his club Hertha Berlin after he not only broke social distancing rules as the Bundesliga carefully tries to edge its way back to staging football again, but he filmed himself doing so. Kalou was streaming the dramatic football live on Instagram, at which stage everyone quite reasonably pointed out that he shouldn’t be shaking hands with people or interrupting a colleague’s medical test because, well, if this whole thing is going to work then we all need to do our bit. Of course, breaking the rules is one thing, but filming himself doing so…well, that’s just thick.

A Hertha statement said: “With this video taken inside the team’s dressing room, Kalou broke clear internal rules and displayed a behaviour which is neither appropriate for this current situation nor reflective of the code of conduct of Hertha BSC. The club has therefore made the decision to suspend the player in question from training and matches with immediate effect.”

Kalou, in fairness, immediately apologised: “I did not really think about it and I was glad that our tests were all negative. I would also like to apologise to those shown in the video who did not know that I was broadcasting live and whom I did not want to put in such a situation.”

Perhaps that will be the end of the matter, but it does display what a knife edge this plan to bring football back so quickly is on. One careless/stupid act like this could potentially scupper the whole thing, and with three Cologne staff having tested positive for coronavirus and seven others in the top two German leagues likewise, you strongly get the feeling that it could all collapse around our ears very soon.

We’ll start with the caveats that looking for positives from the coronavirus crisis is at best an insensitive exercise, and that we should all be cautious about suggesting an up side to this whole tragic business. When the crisis is over, or at least dissipating, however…well that’s a different matter entirely.

Because reports that, when the Premier League does return absolutely every game will be shown live in some way sound…well, absolutely excellent. The Times reports that some games could be streamed on YouTube, and others could be free to air on the usual outlets, which is rather like traipsing through the desert for a week with no water, but at the end of your journey having 100 gallons of the stuff poured over your head.

So while looking for positives is probably an insensitive thing, equally everyone has to have something to look forward to. And the ability to watch every single game live is most definitely something to look forward to.

For Football365, Seb Stafford-Bloor writes that the lasting image of Kevin Keegan as Newcastle manager shouldn’t be the “I would love it” clip, but him explaining on the steps of St James’s Park why he sold Andy Cole to Manchester United in 1995.

On this day in 2009, the best of Fergie’s final great Manchester United team and the worst of the late 2000s Arsenal side, as United went through to the Champions League final with one of the great counter-attacking goals.