Ole Gunnar Solskjaer
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer revelled in Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp’s complaints about the number of penalties Manchester United have been awarded this season. Klopp was seething after Sadio Mane was denied a spotkick in Liverpool’s 1-0 defeat at Southampton on Monday night and United are level on points with the Premier League champions thanks to Bruno Fernandes’s winning penalty against Aston Villa.
Klopp carped United have ‘had more penalties in two years than I had in five-and-a-half years’ and, since the German’s appointment at Anfield in October 2015, Liverpool have received 46 penalties compared with United’s 67 across all competitions.
Solskjaer could not resist quoting the former Liverpool manager Rafael Benitez at the start of his response. “And that’s a fact, probably,” Solskjaer laughed, a reference to Benitez’s fact diatribe against Sir Alex Ferguson in January 2009. “That is probably going to be my answer. That’s a fact that we have got more than him but I don’t know how many penalties they’ve had.
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer said ”I don’t count how many penalties they have, so if they want to spend time on worrying about when we get fouled in the box, I don’t spend time on that. I can’t talk on behalf of other managers, why they say things like this. Obviously, I felt it worked last year in the semi in the FA Cup because Frank spoke about it and we had a nailed-on penalty that we should have had that we didn’t get, so maybe it’s a way of influencing referees. I don’t know, but I don’t worry about that. When they foul our players it’s a penalty. It’s just when it’s inside the box. Anthony came on and he should have had a penalty. They are fine margins when you get to a semi, Even against Sevilla, I thought we played one of our best games and we were very close to getting through against a very difficult side and we have learned hopefully. But it’s not about learning. Sometimes it’s about fine margins and sometimes it’s about quality and we are a better team now than we were six months back or 12 months back. Hopefully we have got the quality when it matters, when we have got a chance or a one-v-one and defenders make a block or we defend well. In semis, you have earned the right to win a trophy by going through. You play against more and more difficult opponents every game and naturally a semi is harder than a quarter-final. The quarter-final a few weeks back [against Everton] was fantastic for us. We showed the quality and strength in depth and hopefully we can make it one step further this time.”
