Manchester United 3-2 Liverpool: Jürgen Klopp's reaction
Jürgen Klopp felt there were some positives to be taken from Liverpool's performance, but acknowledged his side made 'decisive errors' as they were beaten 3-2 by Manchester United in the FA Cup on Sunday.
The Reds went in front after 18 minutes of the fourth-round tie at Old Trafford through a sublime dinked effort from Mohamed Salah.
The hosts levelled soon after, however, when Mason Greenwood finished a counter-attack before Marcus Rashford put them ahead after the break.
Liverpool equalised through Salah just prior to the hour mark, but Bruno Fernandes’ free-kick with 12 minutes to go settled the outcome of the contest.
Afterwards, Klopp answered questions from reporters in his post-match press conference. Read on for a summary of what he had to say.
On going out of the tournament…
It’s not what we wanted, so it’s frustrating. If you want to win tonight, you have to play at your absolute top. We weren’t on our absolute top, but we made a lot of steps in the right direction. The start of the game was good, but then we made decisive mistakes; around the first goal United scored, we had too many options offensively and no protection. We lost the ball and then there was a counter-attack. It was not the first counter-attack in the game, so we have to improve that. You could see the boys really wanted to change the fortune, they wanted to score goals and that’s good. We did that, we scored twice, which is good as well. That’s all OK but in the end they scored three, we scored two and they are through and we are not. That’s a fact as well. We can take positives out of this game, of course – I saw a lot of steps in the right direction and that’s all good. It was good preparation for the Tottenham game with their counter-attacking threat. We know exactly what we have to work on. If you are in a situation you don’t like, you want to get out of it. We want to get out of it and for that we have to make steps. Tonight we made these steps – not the final ones, but we made steps and that’s for the moment OK.
On scoring twice after going four Premier League matches without finding the net…
Of course, of course we take that. We scored two goals, we had other situations where we could have scored as well. We had other situations where we created really well against a deep-defending block, so that is good. There were a lot of good things but it’s a result game and we need results. If we scored two then that should not then mean we concede three. There were obvious mistakes around the goals: the first, protecting, the second, a mishit of the ball and the third, your colleagues told me now it was not a foul. I didn’t see it so I cannot change that, but the free-kick they got, the journalist said it might not be a foul but I didn’t see it back. That’s how it is, you have to stay stubborn in moments like this. You have to do the right stuff again and again and we will. If you want to change something you have to work hard and that’s what we will do.
On trusting the players to improve their form and deliver results...
There’s no doubt about my trust. But trust doesn’t mean we are not critical of ourselves, it’s not that I say, ‘You did everything right in the last few years so now I don’t care if you made some mistakes.’ That’s not like this. We are really in the situation 100 per cent. But you don’t have to worry about us, as a group we are really together. We know it. If I have a problem, we have a problem. If one player has a problem, we have a problem. That’s all our problem at the moment so we have to sort it together and that’s what we will do. Nobody thinks about the very good things that happened in the last few years – nobody. We are just in this moment and try to win football games again. That’s all.
On whether confidence is an issue…
I don’t want to make that every week now. Tonight I didn’t see any confidence problems. But what we said is when you don’t score for a while it’s not good for the confidence, obviously. The best strikers in the world can tell you they all had moments when they didn’t score with each chance. But it’s all about how you deal with it. We are on it, believe me, and we will sort that.