Klopp Talk: We Had Moments and I Liked the Football We Played

Much like Whose Line is it Anyway, everything about the International Champions Cup is made up and the points don’t matter. Sadly, a 3-1 loss to Borussia Dortmund is still not the kind of pre-season result that sets our hearts racing in anticipation of the year to come. Klopp, however, is prepared to take the entire thing in his stride.

“We’ve said it a few times, football is a results game,” The Boss said (incredibly truthfully) after the game was over. “We lost, Dortmund scored three and we scored one so that’s then a fair result. For both teams it was obviously very difficult circumstances, the humidity and all that stuff. I think a few players thought after five minutes: ‘Wow, where are we here?’ So that was the football we played in the first half.”

Still, even with a loss from not scoring as many goals as the other team, there were a few things that Klopp liked about the game.

“The beginning of Dortmund was good, then we controlled the game kind of but we didn’t create chances,” he added. “But we scored the goal after a nice set-piece. Set-pieces were probably the most positive thing today. In the second half we played much better against a completely different Dortmund side. Our pressing was much better. Dortmund tried to play football and played our cards, if you want, which helps us a little bit to do this. We won the balls, but we didn’t do very good things with the balls we won. The surprise is that we scored the goal in the first half and not in the second half. We had two big chances after set-pieces again with Dom Solanke and Joe Gomez. We had a big, big chance with Ojo. Daniel was in a few good moments. We had these moments, and I liked the football we played there.”

All the great chances — and what is hopefully the return of the Daniel Sturridge we know and love — still didn’t change the result, however, and Klopp is eager to look ahead to Manchester City on Wednesday.

“It doesn’t help really and I don’t want to excuse the result but we had these situations and didn’t, or couldn’t, use them. Then Dortmund scored a second and the third was really too much. The fourth would have been possible after we lost the ball again, you could see morale was really down. We have to learn from it, that’s how it is, and then we have to go again.”