Klopp Talk: It was an Intense Game

The UK (as is the rest of the world) is in the middle of yet another coronavirus surge, one that hasn’t exactly spared football players. And despite both teams lacking key players because of said surge, the game this weekend went forward and was about as frustrating as could be expected. Liverpool were once again the victim of terrible officiating, which we’ve talked about in detail here. Pretty much the only thing the match had going for it was the fact that at least it ended in a draw.

“Let’s start with the result,” Klopp said in the post-game press conference. “The result is fine, would’ve been different, I think, with different decisions from the ref. But with the decisions, how he did it, I’m fine with the result. It’s a 2-2 at Tottenham – that’s absolutely OK.”

“It was a difficult game for us for plenty of reasons. One is that we had to change a lot [because of illness] and it’s obviously then difficult to deal with the different challenges in a game like this. The challenge was today we play against Tottenham, who set up a 5-3-2 and when they won the ball deep in their own half, they just kicked it as far as possible and Kane and Son were on their bikes for it, so we struggled with these moments slightly. It costs you obviously, it gives you some struggles a little bit, so we had to reorganise our protection a little bit better in the second half. That we don’t run always in a counter-attack, that it now makes no sense that Ibou Konate is involved in our offensive passing and Tyler Morton is the one who stands against Harry Kane – that’s not really how it should be.”

“So that’s the football part. It was an intense game, Tottenham looked second half slightly fresher than us. Yeah, we were 2-1 up, they couldn’t score the second as well. But, of course, the game would have been completely different with two key decisions in the first half.”