Klopp Aims to Improve on Last Season’s Dire Performance at Brighton

Speaking ahead of Liverpool’s latest trip to London, head coach Jürgen Klopp emphasized the need to dramatically up the performance from last season:

Whichever options you have, if you play like you played last year, you will get a massive knock again. That’s how it is. So we should play better and I think we can play better, that’s the first step into the right direction, that’s what we have to make sure. Brighton had now I think a few results which didn’t go exactly in their way, but that’s a completely normal situation in a development. They had a lot of changes, lost top players – one of them we got – and still played incredible football. We could watch a little bit before the game; we couldn’t see the first half when they were 2-0 down [on Thursday night], I saw the second half when they put Marseille massively under pressure and got a point there.

So, we expect a really tough game, a really tough game against one of the best sides in the league, best-coached team in the league, I would say, because where they’re coming from and yes, Graham [Potter] did already a lot of stuff and that’s a really smart move from Potter to De Zerbi, to be honest. But they made really big steps and super-consistent, different formations, different players, line-ups – wow, in the end you always see Brighton football and I couldn’t respect that more. But I’m really looking forward to the game because we have to put a few things right, because you can look once silly but you should not look a second time silly. It still can happen because they are really good, but we have to do better and we will give it a proper try to do better definitely.

Klopp will be without Curtis Jones, who has been a lynchpin in Liverpoool’s better form since last April. Given Jones’ absence, the Liverpool manager will have selections to make in the midfield and — due to Diogo Jota’s shorter suspension and Cody Gakpo’s injury — perhaps less choices to make up front for once.