Q&ACody Gakpo interview: 50 goals landmark, improving performances and Anfield wish

The Reds ground out a 1-0 win away at Nottingham Forest last time out, with Alexis Mac Allister’s 97th-minute goal earning three points.

Head coach Arne Slot and the squad frankly acknowledged that victory on Sunday came despite the team’s overall display not reaching the standard they aspired to.

But Liverpool nevertheless head in to Saturday’s Anfield clash with West Ham United in the Premier League having lost only twice in the 20 games since they won the away fixture versus the Hammers back in November.

Liverpoolfc.com sat down with Gakpo for a pre-match interview at the AXA Training Centre on Thursday. Read the Q&A below.

Looking back on the Forest game to start with – nobody was happy with the performance coming away from it but is it one where you take the three points and move forward?

Yeah, I think if you saw how the game was going, not the best game from our side. Not really much happened. And then to get a win, I think everybody would take that.

Rio Ngumoha obviously came on in that game and had a big impact. How impressed and excited are you with him as a teammate and someone who can have a real effect in the future?

Very excited. He’s a very good player at this age already and he showed that again when he came on. I think everybody’s excited. We just have to wait and see what he will do in the next games when he’s playing and I think it’s up to him to keep improving himself in ways he can and to keep doing what he’s doing to become what he thinks and what we think and what we see he can be. So, yeah, very happy to have him on the team obviously. It’s nice.

You’ll know better than us from watching him from the outside, he seems to have a level head as well? You’ve been through that, you came through at a young age at PSV Eindhoven. He seems calm, not letting anything faze him at this point?

Yeah, he’s a great character. I think all the other players at the moment who are young and training with us are very good characters. I think they all help each other as well to stay calm, and he’s doing that. I think Trey [Nyoni] is doing that as well, and they are often together. I think that’s very good for them. They don’t get carried away by either good or bad things that happen, and I think that will only benefit them in the future when they’re a little bit older.

On yourself, did you know you were coming up to 50 goals for Liverpool? How much would that have a nice meaning for you?

I need two more, yes! It’s always nice to reach certain amounts and I think 50 goals is an amount that counts in some way, so yeah, that would be nice.

And on the season overall, how have you found it? It has not been an easy one for anybody. How have you found it for you?

No, exactly. Those are the right words. It’s not an easy season for the team. We were too inconsistent at times; to play one good game and then the level dropped significantly the next game. But I think the last few weeks were better performance-wise and result-wise, if you exclude the last game as a performance. I hope we can keep this momentum that we have a little bit with keeping clean sheets and winning the games – and to also perform better – to end the season in a good flow and then at the end of the season we can really assess how everything went.

As it stands now I think everybody will agree with me that it’s not the place where we would put ourselves at the beginning of the season, if you look at last season where we won the league and we were, in my opinion, very consistent in doing all the things on the pitch, also result-wise but also how we performed as a team, as an individual, as a unit. But unfortunately that’s also sometimes part of football that this happens. I think we are now in a better place than we were before and, like I said, we have to keep on building and stay together.

We’re back at home on Saturday against West Ham. Is the idea of making Anfield more powerful and being strong at home something that you and the rest of the squad are conscious of, building up that home form?

Yeah, it’s always very important to have a very strong home front. It was for so many years, it was very difficult to come to Anfield and even take a point. I experienced that when I first came, we didn’t lose that much games at home as we did this season, but it’s up to us as a team to build that confidence again for the stadium and also that teams that come there don’t have the confidence they have. We just have to start winning all the games again at Anfield.

You’ve touched on it a couple of times in terms of what could still be done this season. What would you love to achieve in these last few months of the season?

We’re still in the Champions League and in the FA Cup, so if you speak about winning things, if we could win the Champions League and the FA Cup and reach top four, I don’t want to say it would be a better season than last season, but then it would be an amazing season as well.