Jurgen Klopp has rubbished suggestions he needs to further strengthen his squad after Liverpool’s 2-0 defeat to Burnley.
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Andre Gray, who netted the second after laying on the first goal for Sam Dyche, later confessed he should have scored a hat-trick although Klopp, keen to deflect from a woeful defensive showing, perversely tried to blame his forwards for the defensive woes. To prove it, he started James Milner in the back, only swapping him with the Spaniard in the second half.
‘If one game changed my mind then I would be a real idiot, ‘ said the German bluntly. I try to keep a level head – I know how it works, one day you can be the best player in the world, and the next you can be the worst, so I just take the good with the bad.
“We never got disappointed without the ball, but we kept our shape and kept looking to break on the counter”. They knew it was going to be tough this season but they are sticking with us and we are going to need that, but I think it’s good when days come around like this, for the whole town.
The German stated he would only be angry with his players for the loss if it served a objective.
“I said to Steven at half-time: “Welcome to the Premier League”,” added Dyche.
“It is not allowed that you suffer under your own poor possession because it makes no sense”.
Klopp refused to put the defeat down to it merely being an off-day. “No”. We have 36 left, that’s a big number. Not only did they lose, but the Reds fell by a two goal margin, which seems like it would be pretty hard to do when your opponent only has the ball for 19% of the game. “Good link-up play between the two strikers, everyone knows I prefer, when I can, to play with two strikers – and it was a good press”.
“But you have to see through what the opposition are doing and I am really pleased with the players today, because they could have got lost in that game, but they stayed in their shape, stayed diligent and kept working, knowing we had a threat”.
“It’s not that we didn’t want it – six or seven times Phil [Coutinho] alone was in the right position to shoot”.
“It was a day we can all be proud of”.
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“It is not a defending problem it is an offensive problem”, said Klopp, testily. We should be ready in our development and these mistakes shouldn’t happen any more, but our training drills did not include us playing the ball at the wrong time [for the goals] to the opponent.
