For 76 minutes, Liverpool were “really bad,” but what Jurgen Klopp saw from that point on was more than worthy of points as Liverpool again summoned their comeback powers at Crystal Palace.
Here are four key points from the manager’s post-match press conference…
A special shirt for Mo!
Mohamed Salah‘s goal was his 200th for Liverpool, and the club were quick to commemorate his historic milestone with a special ‘Salah 200’ shirt.
“We’ve carried that shirt already for two weeks with us, now, finally, we could give it to him,” Klopp revealed. But if he gave a speech, Klopp wasn’t able to say!
He continued: “It was a pretty loud reception for him in the dressing room, when I gave him the shirt with the 200 on the back.
“The players were asking for a speech, but you’ll have to ask him if he gave one, because I had to go for media work then, so I don’t know!”
0-76 minutes was “really bad”
For so long it was not Liverpool’s day, it took the opposition going down to 10 men to spark any reaction, and the number of offsides spoke volumes to Klopp.
“For 76 minutes, it was a really bad performance,” he assessed. “We didn’t have rhythm changes or accelerations, no timing.
“No idea how many times we were offside, horrendous!”
In the end, the Reds were offside six times – Darwin Nunez was responsible for three – compared to Palace’s zero.
But 76-105 was “really good”
A switch flipped quickly after the sending off and what Klopp saw from that point on was thanks to his subs and a performance that “deserved” points.
“What we did from 76 to 105 or whatever, that was really good,” he said. “As we all know, against 10 men you can have much more problems than we had today.
“We really turned the game around, the subs were super influential. That’s actually the story so far this season, what we bring from the bench has a real impact.
“With the last 15-20 minutes we deserved it, before that we deserved nothing.”
A “really tough” week
Two away league games in less than three days and both ended in victories, it has taken a toll, but Klopp has made sure to use his full squad.
“The bad thing about the amount of games we play is it’s really tiring, it’s just like that.
“It makes no sense if I think about that (an ideal system) as we have to work with the players we have available, physically available.
“Who is there, and what can we do? We can play different systems with these boys, no shadow of a doubt.
“But we have to think about a lot of things before a game, we came through this week, really tough and really tricky, but all good!”
Next up in the league, Man United at Anfield…
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