Klopp Talk: Maribor Thrashing “Better Than Good”

Liverpool’s 7-0 shellacking of Maribor in the Champions League on Tuesday night was nice. It was a nice. And you know what? We all deserve nice things.

Go ahead. Say it. Look at yourself in the mirror and repeat after me.

“This is a nice thing. I deserve nice things.”

See? Cherish this feeling.

Jurgen Klopp is definitely cherishing this feeling right now. Following his side’s tremendous performance, he made his feelings about the game more than clear. Liverpool’s performance was, in his words, “good, or better than.”

“From the first second it was exactly what we wanted to do. We wanted to show the best counter-pressing of the last few weeks because I really thought that protecting our offensive movements, patterns and all that stuff were already really good against United but we could have done even better in counter-pressing. Tonight we did much better and against a football-playing side like Maribor, it made a lot of sense.”

Klopp also talked about his team’s renewal of the pressing game that has made them so dangerous since he came to Anfield.

“We scored the first goal from a pressing situation and a few other goals were after a counter-pressing situation, so it helped a lot. Then, how we finished these situations was also good. A lot this season already [we have been] alone in the box to make a cross or a pass, but were not relaxed enough to play the right pass. Tonight it was different. Always when we let them play, they played immediately and were around our 18-yard box and that only showed how good they could be. But we never gave up in this game, especially in the second half. It was good - all-round a really, really good performance otherwise you cannot win 7-0 - so we are really happy about that.”

He also offered some encouraging words for second-half substitute Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, whose late goal was the cherry on top of an excellent performance.

“It helps a lot - he could have scored two. It was nice from Daniel [Sturridge], how he made this goal, it was really cool and I liked it. The performance was very active, [he] had crosses, was involved not immediately - obviously we forgot a fresh player was on the right wing so we didn’t involve him from the beginning - when they recognised that Ox was now there he was really involved and it was good.”

In sum, this was a nice outing. Let’s do this again sometime.