Saturday evening saw Anfield host its first game of the 2016/17 season following the opening of its shiny new Main Stand, and the home side marked the occasion by humbling the reigning Premier League champions, Leicester City.
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Goals from Roberto Firmino and Sadio Mane put Liverpool 2-0 ahead, only for awful play by emergency centre-half Lucas to hand Jamie Vardy a goal for the visitors.
But Jamie Vardy scored one of the easiest goals of his career, tapping into an empty net after a poor back pass from Lucas.
Second-half goals from Adam Lallana and Roberto Firmino put the result beyond doubt.
“The quicker we can get over this the better”, said Drinkwater.
“Jeff [Schlupp] has started with us, the normal warm-up, and then he does something different”, Ranieri said.
“Today we were good”.
Liverpool dazzled offensively as they beat Arsenal 4-3 in their season opener, and while they have lacked consistency under Juergen Klopp, they reaffirmed their class going forward in a vibrant display that exposed the champions’ limitations.
Klopp also admitted that Lucas, who gave Leicester a glimmer of hope with a poor mis-control, was not fully prepared to play the entire game.
“Liverpool played better than us and deserved to win”, he said. We have to clean our mind. Conceding six goals in three games should worry the former Borussia Dortmund boss as his side takes on The Foxes, who have added firepower to their front line with a club-record signing of Algerian striker Islam Slimani.
“We can be really good but we have to show that we can still be good when something happens in the game that we don’t want”.
“We were OK for the first ten minutes until they scored a goal but after that we lost everything”.
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“Our squad was not too small, not too big, but we found a few really good young players in this pre-season where it was like “wow”.
