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Liverpool’s 18-game unbeaten streak was snapped by Swansea on Monday, a disappointing blow following the previous week’s dispatching of title favourites Manchester City. A long an unbeaten streak and having defeated the title favourites the week before, though, doesn’t make things better.
Instead, it makes the loss harder to take. But it does, perhaps, give some hope for a quick bounce back. So says manager Jürgen Klopp, who isn’t looking for silver linings in the Swansea defeat and is determined that against West Brom and then Huddersfield his side will prove they’re still the team that beat City.
“It doesn’t make the game better,” Klopp noted on the club’s official website. “I don’t forget that the boys delivered in the last few weeks and months but, for the moment, it doesn’t help. We need to deliver all the time, we know that, and we didn’t deliver.”
If it simply was a case of failing to deliver—a letdown after a big win—then facing West Brom in the FA Cup on Saturday is a perfect chance to prove that. The fear, though, is that West Brom are a side ideally suited to setting up the way Swansea did to frustrate Liverpool.
In the league this season, only four side have held Liverpool without a goal. At one end of it sit Jose Mourinho’s expensive bus and Manchester United alongside Manchester City, the latter of which kept Liverpool off the scoresheet in a game in which the Reds were sent down to ten men.
And at the other end sit Swansea and West Brom. Having kept Liverpool scoreless once already, the Baggies will be relishing the chance to try to do so again—and to perhaps pull off the upset. Failing to deliver or being found out is the question, then, with the answer perhaps coming on Saturday.
“It’s hard work on a night like that, Swansea fighting for their life,” added the Liverpool manager. “I don’t expect free-flowing football. We threw everything in their box, to be honest. We nearly [got a goal at the end] but it doesn’t make the game better.
“No points or one point is maybe a big difference at the end but now, again, we have to strike back immediately. That’s what we will do.”