Liverpool managed to draw away to Manchester United and suffered a heavy defeat against Atalanta at Anfield in midweek. They tried to bounce back against Crystal Palace, which was the worst possible run of results, but it was a painful defeat, as they unexpectedly lost two consecutive games at home.
Liverpool were by no means without chances. Luis Diaz, Darwin Nunez, Curtis Jones, Mohamed Salah and Diogo Jota all had chances to score, but the tenacity of the opposition defence meant that none of them could capitalise. In their recent matches, they have continued to attack but have been unable to finish.
It was a tough loss for the title contenders, but Jurgen Klopp gave his side credit for their second-half display and said they should have won the game.
“I understand it 100%. Of course you have to ask these questions, what it means for the title-race,”
“I am not dumb. I know that.” “The answer is pretty easy. If we play like in the first half, why should we win the league? If we play like in the second half, we can win football games.”
“If we can win football games, then we will see how many we win and then we will see. We have to be around when the other guys struggle, if they struggle. That’s how it is.”
“For us, we have to win football games anyway. We have now a string of four away games. That would have been tough anyway. It will be tough, we know that, it’s clear. We have to deal with that now, that’s the easy thing. There is nothing else.”
“The criticism in these moments is completely fine and absolutely right. It’s all about how we deal with it. First half we didn’t deal with it particularly well with the situation but in the second half we pulled ourselves together and should have won the game. We didn’t do, I saw the result. That’s it.”
The games against United and Atalanta were not unwinnable. It was just a result of the team continuing to miss a number of chances.
He also commented on the fact that the players who were forced to play at full strength during the period of injuries are beginning to show signs of fatigue, and that the returning players are not in the best of condition.
“I see the same game like you do,”
“Did Wataru (Endo) and Macca (Alexis Mac Allister) play now a little bit too much in the last few weeks? Maybe. They were the two most-used, especially Macca.”
“The guys come back from injury, Curt (Jones) today really good. Dom (Szoboszlai) came back from injury, kind of a rhythm.”
“I think for the situation Trent (Alexander-Arnold) is in, that was really good. I don’t think he could now play 120 minutes. Robbo (Andy Robertson) came back from injury. A couple of players had to play a lot and a couple were always interrupted. That’s the fitness situation.”
“But it is actually not too interesting for us if we find the real answer. We just have to make sure that we don’t think where we are coming from, injured or not, and we just have to find a way to beat the specific opponent in front of us.”
“It is always like that for winning, as a manager, you always find a lot of explanations. This was great, this was great. When you lose, it is not as easy to find those things. And they might be obvious, but it’s not about pointing the finger at that, or that, or that.”
“The solution is always being really together on the pitch for us. Where we are, we got it because against the ball we were an absolute machine and that is what we have to be.”
“In that moment, we have the rhythm, momentum in the game, they don’t feel great, we feel much better. Then these boys can really play football. Today they showed that in a really difficult situation, that they can do that.”
“And that was good. But it doesn’t feel great anyway now as we lost the game and we planned this day completely differently. But here we are and we have to deal with that.”