Jürgen Klopp met with the media following Liverpool's scoreless draw with Chelsea. The boss seemed pleased that the Reds picked up a point and the performance of Curtis Jones, he also discussed whether he thought a Top-4 spot was still attainable.
A draw can either be viewed as a point gained or two points dropped. Klopp prefers to look at this match as if the Reds picked up a point instead of losing two.
“Gained. It's an away game; this was not the most spectacular 0-0 I ever saw,” Klopp said. “Very similar teams I would say, but completely different football because of a different level of confidence for both teams. This was the fight we have to show tonight, this was the way we have to start our development again. We cannot now hope – because we did a couple of things that were absolutely not like they should have been – that we fixed it overnight. I decided to make six changes, that always against a good football team can be a problem.”
Curtis Jones does not often crack the Starting XI, but he did in this match and his play impressed the boss.
“Good. Absolutely good,” Klopp said. “Until he lost power a little bit, but that's now completely normal. [The] midfield was OK, but... if you go back and look [at] all the chances Chelsea had [it] was after we lose the ball in the moment where we cannot lose the ball.”
Klopp admitted that reaching the Top-4 of the table and earning a Champions League spot may now be out of reach.
“I don't know if there is any chance, for that we must win pretty much all the games and the other teams must lose a lot of games. It's not in our hands,” he said. “We have another 10 games to play and the next one is Arsenal. Not the other nine, I am not interested in [those games]. But the next one is Arsenal, so if we are difficult to beat against Arsenal we can win this game.”
Klopp may see the draw with Chelsea as a point gained, but I don't believe many Reds supporters view it the same way. Liverpool needed all 3 points to stay in the race for the Top-4, and even Klopp admitted reaching that plateau was now going to be tough.
One surprising omission is that he did not directly address the reason behind six changes in the lineup, other than to say that it made things tough. It is quite possible that it was due to an internal matter that Klopp did not want to be brought out to the media, but that is just speculation.
