Liverpool rounded off their pre-season tour of Asia with a win secured through goals in either half by Jordan Henderson and Mohamed Salah. The evening was marred by a muscle injury sustained by Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain shortly before the half-time interval – a blot on an occasion Klopp was otherwise thoroughly satisfied with.
Jürgen Koppler talks about his present and future at the Liverpool helm
“They were good, really good. But I don’t think it makes too much sense to talk after a football game about individual players, to be honest, because I’m not sure exactly but I think 32 players round about we used tonight and I liked all of them, what they did, to be honest. It looked really like proper football, our pressing was extremely obvious, which is very important for us. It’s still really early. I know we don’t have a long time, it’s only two weeks until we face Man City so we should not waste time, but we are only a week together now, with different circumstances – not in our training ground or somewhere in Europe where we are used to the circumstances. No, we are here and we try to squeeze every minute out for training. Apart from Oxlade getting injured – muscle, hamstring, we will see how bad it is – the rest was absolutely top-class.”
"The way we played football. If you didn’t see it and just read the result, we played a good game against United but we lost 4-0 because we made mistakes in completely the wrong moments. Football mistakes likely lead to goals or at least to chances. But it depends where you make the mistakes and you can still sort it with defending. The mistakes we made against United were not to sort anymore because we were open in these moments."
“We were much more compact today. We still played really good football – which we did against United as well. We scored twice, which we didn’t do. It was a clear step in the right direction and that makes me really happy. It’s our second game and we have to work a lot in the next four weeks, I would say especially, to prepare the rest of the season. There are already Premier League games but anyway we have to use the time because from mid-September on we will not have time to train anymore because we just play then every three days.”
“That’s why it’s so important that we get through these kind of things; that some players had 45 minutes, it was right for them, others 30 minutes. They might have been able to play a little bit longer as well but I really wanted to give the young boys an opportunity as well to play in this incredible atmosphere because they do everything with us, they are constantly with us and then in the moment like this where it’s really enjoyable to play football, we would leave them out? I didn’t want to have that, that’s why they came on. So far, so OK.”
"Normally our pre-season is always the basis for the rest of the season, this time we have the first part of the season that’s interrupted. If you would have asked me three years ago if I can expect something like that… OK, with the World Cup it was clear, but we are already kind of used to it because with the pandemic we had breaks and starting again. So it’s not completely new to us anymore and when these players have time off, for example, if they are not at the World Cup, they never have real time off, they have a training schedule to fulfil so they don’t lose a lot in these periods, which is very important for us. That’s why we can give them at least as long as possible time off with family and holiday and stuff like this, but they just need it. Apart from that, the World Cup is for all top teams in football pretty much the same, especially in England it’s the same because we play immediately. If you are in the final or the third-place [game] then you play again a week later... and then you play 26th, 31st, 2nd and stuff like this. Obviously the guys in the Premier League like the spectacular. I’ve said it often enough, nobody really cares about the players in these moments but that’s how it is."
“Top-class, everything was top-class from start to finish. Thank you very much, Singapore, it was absolutely outstanding. Even the coaches found a padel place where we could do a little bit. Absolutely great. The welcome was outstanding; the city, the things I saw, looked beautiful. It looks like a place where you can have a good life. Obviously we don’t see everything, or not a lot, but the first impression was absolutely outstanding and it will not be the last time I come here. If it would be closer I would come more often here, but 14 hours’ flight is, I would say, not around the corner. But really thank you for everything, it was top.”
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