Klopp Rates Fabinho, Mané After Burnley Victory

Klopp sees things that the rest of us doesn’t. This is the reason he’s the manager of Liverpool Football Club and we’re on Twitter. Today’s game was ugly, with the weather, the pitch, the referee, and sometimes the players against us. But for Klopp, the afternoon was perfect and certain performances were worth lauding after the final whistle blew.

“[Fabinho] probably would have already scored much more goals for Liverpool if I would have put him in the box in offensive set-pieces: only recently we put him in and since then he scores!” Klopp said about the Brazil international who is sitting on five goals in the last seven games. “Great goal, an absolutely great goal. Yes, the space where the ball came to Sadio was the plan, but not in that height obviously so Sad made absolutely the most of it with a great header, great deflection, and then timing perfect with it. Fab is there for the first one, then scores a counter-pressing goal in the six-yard box which is absolutely outstanding.”

And about Mané who’s back from leading Senegal to their recent AFCON win:

“[Sadio] played really, really well. As I said before [the game], it was not the plan to start him today because we know how intense everything was, but Diogo had a dead leg and couldn’t train yesterday, so we started Sadio. Luis has adapted really well but this is a completely different game, like a ‘Welcome to the Premier League’, so we didn’t want to try it if we didn’t need it so that’s why we started like we started – and Sad did really well. He worked incredibly hard and that’s exactly what we expected.”