Jürgen Klopp met with the media for a short presser after Liverpool's 3-1 win over LASK to open Europa League play. The boss gave his assessment of the match, discussed the impact of young players and reaching his record 50th European win.
Even though Liverpool were trailing at halftime, Klopp said the team played well in the first half but they just could not finish the chances.
“We had very good moments but I saw the boys didn't feel that, it was not that we could gain confidence from our good moments – and thought maybe we should do that again. But we suffered a lot from the lesser-good moments, Klopp said. “We showed two football situations from the first half where we did really well. I'm pretty sure the boys would have thought there was nothing good in the first half, but that's not true; we had good moments and that's what we showed and besides that. I told them we had to get rid of the frustration and start getting back into the game again and we have a good chance to turn it around. And that's what we did.”
Even though it was household names like Mohamed Salah, Luis Diaz and Darwin Núñez that got on the scoresheet, Klopp adds that the young players on the squad were also impressive.
“I know that people expect us to fly through this competition. It will not happen. It will not happen in the group stage, it will not happen in the knockout stage. It will not happen. We have to dig into it and that's what we did. It was a massive learning curve tonight,” Klopp said. “If we would have used Ben Doak a little bit more often, given him the ball, I think he would have got the ball more times on the touchline and passed the ball inside or whatever. Stefan [Bajcetic] found a way into the game after a rather difficult start.”
With the win vs. Lask Klopp became the first Liverpool manager to record 50 victories in European competition, passing Rafael Benitez for that honour. Klopp remains modest about the achievement.
“Let me say it like this, if I have still 50 after the group stage then I'm still the most successful Liverpool manager [in this regard] and everybody will hate the fact! [It's] nice. We played quite a lot of games in Europe. It's good that we won that many, we qualified frequently for finals so of course we should have won games. It's great but probably it's because in European competition there are just much more games than in the past. I'm pretty sure that's it.”
Even though Liverpool did not play their best first half, Klopp put a positive spin on it as to not discourage the younger players. It also speaks volumes that he downplayed winning 50 European matches, Those are just two examples of why Klopp is a great manager.