Klopp Talk: “We Have to Improve”

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He’s right and he should say it.

It’s been an absolutely exhausting start to the season. Liverpool are sitting at 9th in the league and have seemed more confused about how football is played than they have been in years. The 3-3 draw against Brighton (at Anfield, no less) this weekend started off terribly, got a bit better, and then went back to awful again. Obviously, the boss has a lot to say on top topic.

“I have to look back [to see if] it’s now a ‘slow start’,” Jurgen Klopp told the club’s website. “How I said… it’s normal you adapt. [For example], when we play Brentford: you watch them and they play football against everybody, not against us, just long balls. You can expect that but then they might all of a sudden start playing football because now it makes sense against Liverpool. It happens quite frequently that teams do differently against us than what we can prepare for if we don’t play them like the fifth, sixth or seventh time. Today, was it a slow start? I’m not even 100 per cent sure, it’s just at the start our gaps in the areas where they wanted to play were too big obviously.”

“They build up with the three in the back so Bobby had to do differently, midfield had to do differently, we needed to lead the passes to the outside. There we can go but we were fixed with the full-backs deep because of their wing-backs and all these kind of things. It is not rocket science but it happens, you realise it, you sort it because we have a lot of solutions meanwhile, but before we were in the solution mood we were already 2-0 down. Then you saw the difference in the game, it was not then that they had one chance after another. They had still their moments, no doubt about that, but then we started controlling the game better, scored the goal and in half-time showed the boys two or three situations, came out, did much better, even without being now flying.”

“It is a moment and we have to really keep going through together,” he added. “That’s all what I can say. We have to improve, that only happens if we perform, we have to perform more consistently. I cannot say what everybody wants to hear now, it’s just the reality and how I said, that process started already, interrupted by press conferences and interviews, but from tonight on we will prepare for Rangers and we will try to do better. I know then Arsenal is coming and we saw glimpses of their game against Tottenham, they are outstanding in the moment so that is obviously not an easy game. But we will give it a proper try.”