Wolves 0-1 Liverpool: Jürgen Klopp's reaction
Jürgen Klopp paid tribute to the mental and physical resilience of his Liverpool team after they secured a hard-fought 1-0 win over Wolverhampton Wanderers on Monday night.
In a battling encounter at Molineux, the Reds claimed the three points courtesy of Diogo Jota's strike in first-half additional time against his former club.
Both sides had chances to inflict further change on the scoresheet, but the visitors remained resolute for more than 100 minutes after a lengthy stoppage following a serious head injury to the hosts' goalkeeper, Rui Patricio.
Read on for a summary of Klopp's assessment of the victory over Wolves from his post-match press conference…
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On Patricio...
We wish him, of course, all the best. It was a very awful situation. I didn't even see it, to be honest. I only saw the impact obviously but not the situation because I watched the goal and then I saw the flag going up and I was surprised that the goalie is on the ground. But I heard how it happened and in these moments everything loses importance immediately. I don't know how long it took exactly but seven, eight minutes and that's really long and then you worry even more. We wish him all the best, a good recovery and hopefully it will be fine immediately.
On the impact Jota's return from injury is having on the team...
Diogo is just a class football player but we don't, we cannot take it for granted that a boy who's been out for three months – or maybe even a little bit longer – is coming back and has an immediate impact again. That's pretty rare, to be honest, but he has since he's back. That is really helpful and tonight makes it even more special that he could score that goal, which was a nice goal and good play, passing situation from us. And the perfect moment to score the goal, to be honest, like a second before the half-time whistle. So that was really good but the rest of the game was obviously a lot of defending and I'm completely fine with that because that's exactly what we wanted to do and that's exactly what I wanted to see – that we show 100 per cent that we understand the situation right. It's not about being Liverpool on a duller night, it's about being Liverpool and being ready for fighting with all we have for a result. That must be possible even on nights when we are not at our absolute best. I'm really happy about the performance, it's all fine, but obviously the game, I think Robbo called it an ugly three points and I called it a dirty three points. I couldn't be more happy about these three points.
On the performance of centre-back pairing Ozan Kabak and Nathaniel Phillips…
They played now the second game in a row together and did really well. You can imagine the Leipzig game was difficult, but tonight was difficult for completely different reasons because the speed of Traore is actually undefendable in moments. The first situation was, I think, a pass pretty early in the game… I didn't like the start of the game too much, to be honest, [because] we were not active enough, but that pass in behind you cannot avoid all the time. It was clear offside but because of the rules they let it run and that had an impact on our last line for a few minutes, so we had to get settled again. From that moment on, they played really, really well and I liked it a lot. It was a massive task from a concentration point of view, but they did really well and I'm really happy.