Klopp Talk: “You Have To Work For It”

It’s been a weird enough week for Liverpool fans without having to contend with slipping all the way to sixth place in the league after failing to capitalise on chance after chance against Newcastle United. There’s really nothing to say about Liverpool’s performance that hasn’t already been said, but the boss spent some time voicing his frustration at what’s becoming an incredibly irritating pattern:

“It’s like this: in tricky moments, so things don’t go your way easily, it’s not clicking constantly, these kind of things, the only chance you have is to fight yourself,” he told the club’s website after the game ended. “That means that you really go against it, there is no chance, nothing is allowed, there is no drop-off [in] body language or whatever is allowed at all – you just have to go, to go, to go. I see the same, you said it as well, [that] when things go against us it doesn’t look like, ‘Now we strike back immediately’, which is difficult when there are only two minutes to play and you concede a late goal but what I mean in these moments is you miss chances.”

“When you miss chances, that’s just information – a missed chance is just an information. It means you came into the right space, you could cause them problems, so do it again. If you need a little adaptation then do it, but get there again in the right situation. For example, the second half didn’t start as well as the first half ended football-wise, all of a sudden they had kind of possession. That was completely unnecessary. How I said, we are very critical – in that case anyway because we know the only people to blame for that is us, so we have to do that and we will do that. But it’s not about, and it never was in football, a miracle formula where you say: ‘OK, if you do that, everything will be fine again.’ No, you have to work for it and that is what we will do.”

This season has been a rough one—for players and for the fans. It’s going to end soon (in give games) and then we get to start again. Hopefully some of our luck from previous seasons returns then, too.