Have you got your breath back?
Me? Yeah, I wasn’t running. I’m alright. It was a fairly eventful finish again and I’m obviously pleased to come out on the positive side.
As a start goes and the dramatic nature of that ending, can you imagine it would have been as good as this?
I think I’ve been at pains to say that I don’t have a schedule I’m marking it against. It is what it is. It’s fair to say that we’ve had some significant challenges in the first seven weeks of the season and the way we’ve dealt with them I’ve been really pleased, including today.
Obviously you want to put the game to bed earlier than when we did but sometimes when you score that late it just helps to continue to build that belief in the group and the spirit within the group that we have that in us to go to the last minute. All these things, they’re not by design, it’s just the nature of the game and I’m not sitting here thinking we’re ahead of some schedule.
I can understand why some people might have had that in their minds because they’re making prognostications based on the information they have, but for me it’s just not of interest because I don’t know how far we can go with the group. We just need to keep pushing on.
Do you think we are still going in the right direction with technology and VAR?
You might have to dig up some research on me mate. I think I’m on record as saying that I’ve never really been a fan of it since it came in. Not for any other reason than I think that it complicates areas of the game that I thought were pretty clear in the past, but I can see at the same time why it was inevitable that technology would come in.
We have to deal with it. The biggest problem I think that we have is that we seem to fail to grasp is that no form of technology is going to make the game errorless. We used to understand that errors were part of the game, including officiating errors.
You’d have to cop it and some people would cop it better than others but that was part of the game. The game is littered with historical refereeing decisions that weren’t right but we all accepted it that it was part of the game because we’re dealing with human beings.
I think that people are under the misconception that VAR is going to be errorless. I don’t think there’s any technology, because so much of our game isn’t factual. It’s down to interpretation and they’re still human beings. They’re going to make mistakes the same way managers make mistakes, the same way players make mistakes.
When you put such a high bar on something it invariably is going to fail, so if people are thinking that VAR is going to be something that at some point that is perfect, that’s never going to happen.
Did you think the two sendings off were justified?
Hard for me to comment on decisions on opposition teams, but first one Biss has got a decent whack on his ankle so didn’t look great and I thought the second came from our pressure. I thought we were pretty relentless in the second half and didn’t allow them to breathe. We obviously had the man extra and there were a fair few fouls so I think it was an accumulation of things, but they are decisions against another team. I haven’t commented on decisions against our team this year and there were a couple of times I felt it could have gone either way so I’ll leave it for others to decide if right or wrong.
How pleasing is it that you got the winner without Son, Maddison and Bissouma on the pitch?
We want to be a team that has multiple avenues to score goals and we had to create that because with Harry going there was a fair chunk of goals leaving the team automatically. We weren’t going to replace that with one player. We needed to make sure the way we set up as a team gave us the opportunity to score in different areas. I thought we started the game really well and so did Liverpool. I thought it was a good game at the start and then they went down to 10-men.
Until we scored I thought we were really good and then we lost our way a little bit. We rushed things, overdid things and were a bit too individual in that back end of the first half and it allowed them to get an equaliser. The thing about Liverpool is even with 10-men they are still the same threat because they prey on mistakes, have world-class players in transition and we were a bit naïve I thought, but second half we were better. We controlled the game a lot better, played in our half, we were a bit more calm and probably didn’t vary our attacks enough but having said that Alisson pulled off some unbelievable saves and we just had to stay calm.
Is Son okay as he seemed to be struggling before coming off?
Look, he wasn’t 100% but I had a chat with him yesterday and he was desperate to play. He was going to give what he could and he did. He was never going to play the whole 90, we were always going to give him an hour or so but he led from the front again and he was the one doing the pressing. He got his goal as well so great captain’s effort.
