Klopp Committed to Righting the Ship With Current Squad

Liverpool’s poor form in recent weeks has led to growing criticism of the club’s lack of activity in the January transfer window. Many supporters and pundits thought the Reds needed to bring in at least one center-back to reinforce the injury-plagued defense, but with just 9 days left in the window, there is little belief that any help is coming via the transfer market.

Manager Jürgen Klopp counts himself among those who would have liked to see Liverpool sign another defender, but when the lack of signings was mentioned in his press conference ahead of Liverpool's FA Cup matchup with Manchester United, Klopp made it clear he doesn’t believe that is the cause of their recent struggles.

“No, I don’t think that,” said Klopp. “It would sound like an excuse, and the last thing we are looking for is that.”

According to the German manager, the loss to Burnley yesterday was a result of his squad not playing as well as they should and making poor decisions rather than having anything to do with a lack of reinforcements.

“We could have played better and made better decisions, that’s what we expect from ourselves. That means we can change that. We believe 100% we can change that with this squad. That’s how it is.”

The lack of finishing despite having the edge in possession has been a consistent theme over Liverpool’s recent run of poor results, and Klopp pointed to that as something that can, and must, improve.

“It’s obvious we have, wow, I don’t know how many percent possession in each game, but we have to finish the situations off.”

“That is not the easiest part of the football game, everybody knows that. That doesn’t mean we don’t have to try and have to adapt in specific moments and we have to use the chances when we have them. All these kind of things.”

“On Thursday we had 28 shots and six on target. I heard we had 90 shots in the last five games for one goal. That’s obviously a number we don’t want to have.”

Unfortunately for Liverpool, the condensed schedule doesn’t afford the players much time to work things out on the training pitch, and that’s making it more challenging to find the form that allowed them to run away with last season’s title. Whether Klopp’s team can turn things around on Sunday is yet to be seen, but he is insistent that it won’t be due to a lack of effort.

“There’s not a lot of time now in training. We will talk the things through and try it again. If we can change it immediately on Sunday, I don’t know. But we will not stop trying, I promise.”