Jota Klopp
Jurgen Klopp wants Liverpool to change their mindset at Anfield as he urged his players to “squeeze” everything they can out of the remaining weeks of the season.
Jurgen Klopp said: “One of the main reasons is that there is no crowd in. There’s no doubt about that, but that’s a problem for a lot of teams. Apart from that, the reason we haven’t won home games is because we haven’t played well enough. Not in all of them – there were some home games when we lost when I thought in other times even without the crowd we would or should have won the game. But we didn’t. Now we have a losing streak of what, four games (Klopp is told it’s actually six)… six games in a row? Wow. Okay. That’s long. We have to change that. But it’s not about how we can change that in training or whatever. We have to bring ourselves in the right mindset.”
Liverpool had seemingly turned a corner with three successive victories before the 3-1 setback at Real in midweek. And Klopp wants his players to continue the approach that has dragged them back into contention for a top-four finish and Champions League qualification.
Jurgen Klopp said: “Although it didn’t look like it in Madrid, we decided when we won our three games in a row (away from Anfield) that we will chase everybody in this league. Whether they are behind us or ahead of us, who cares. We want to squeeze out of this season whatever we can get. The game three days ago wasn’t a good thing to do, but it happened. Now we have the chance to do better and that’s what we have to do on Saturday. For a long time, nobody could really explain why we were so strong at home, at least result-wise. Now this current run is not easy to explain. But the main reason we are not exactly the same at home is we miss our supporters. That’s how it is. But we played very good games without supporters at home and that’s what we have to do now.”
In contrast to their poor home form, the defeat in Spain was only Liverpool’s fourth defeat in 20 away games since they were thrashed 7-2 at Aston Villa in October – their heaviest league defeat in 57 years. But when asked if he would prepare for his team’s latest encounter with the Midlanders by showing highlights of the defeat,
Jurgen Klopp responded: “Definitely not! We watched these goals again after the game. We spoke about why things happened that night. Since then, everything has changed so it makes no sense to go back and talk about these things. They are normal football things. It doesn’t help to watch the goals again. If it helped then I would be the first person to show them. We have to think about different things. Sometimes you have to show bad things to make the boys, or people in general, remember some things. I don’t think I’ve done that too often in my life, but it might be the right way sometimes. But I’m 100% sure this time it’s not the right thing. I hope nobody would do it to you – if you have your worst performance for a long, long time and half-a-year later somebody comes around the corner and says ‘by the way, don’t do that again’… I hope nobody does that to you!”
