Klopp and Arteta Talk About Their Fight

It’s hardly the most important take-away from a game where Liverpool came out to play beautiful football and won 4-0 against Arsenal, but a fight is a fight and we’d be remiss not to talk about it.

If you missed it, here’s their disagreement in all its glory:

Both coaches received yellow cards and both coaches ended the game with the most hostile handshake possible.

“Klopp was trying to defend his side, I was trying to defend mine and that’s it,” Arteta said after the match. “For me, all these incidents stay there (on the pitch), they’re part of the way we would like to compete. It was just an action [by Mané] and I try to defend my players and that’s what I did.”

Klopp had a bit more to add:

“It’s actually not a really big deal but now I told all the other [journalists] so I have to tell you as well,” he told the club’s website. “So the situation is that it was a completely clean situation, so nothing happened. Two players jumped in the air, nobody touched the other, at least not like a foul, and the bench of Arsenal is going for whatever and I just asked: ‘What do you want for that? What do you want?’ There is no contact really and it looks like everybody wanted a yellow card. I am really sick of these situations that everybody tries to go for Sadio in these moments. He’s a physical player, obviously, but he doesn’t make harsh fouls. But you might remember last year against Real Madrid he was completely taken out of the game without doing anything by getting a yellow card. Against Atletico we had to take him off because of that and it is just not right. That’s what I said in that situation.”