Jurgen Klopp believes his Liverpool squad are on the brink of something “really special” as they aim to end a testing term on a high.
Jurgen Klopp said: “The thing about a season is you cannot cut off the negative parts from the positive parts and say that we are nearly there. We don’t see it like that, but I tried to explain earlier, I said when we lost our centre-halves, all of them pretty much, we broke our leg, but we could still win games. It was not always in the most convincing fashion but we were still winning games, scoring. Then we had to – and we had to at that time – make midfielders into centre-halves and it broke our spine. Then the whole setup was gone. The young boys were not ready to play at centre-half, the midfielders had to play at times at centre-half. We lost some rhythm all of a sudden but not all the time. Let me remember one game in this very negative period that we had, the game away at Leicester, I never lost a game like that before, ever. I don’t know exactly what the number is for the games I have managed or coached but it was so strange. That day we were clearly the better side, played really good football and lost. So when we have these games, it was like ‘OK, we cannot do a lot of things differently [next time]. A football team is like an orchestra where plenty of people work together and if you lose one piece, you might be able to still do it, but if you lose two then it becomes difficult. Especially in this league where everybody performs with such an incredible high intensity level at least. The intensity of the game is always on the highest level, crazy. And then you lose contact to the football you want to play or you are used to and to the other teams as well. So you need that time to settle again and obviously we found our way out, which is absolutely great. So whatever happens on Sunday, we found our way out to bring us to this situation. Weeks ago it was not even clear that we would play the Europa League, we have achieved that now already. It is not exactly what we want but it is much better than nothing. It gives you, next season, a lot of good games. Ask Manchester United now if at the moment they like the Europa League and they would say yes. They love to play the final and have the chance to win, so we already did kind of a job but not the one we wanted to do. It is how I said before, this year, with the amount of injuries we have had, it was not the year to become champions. No chance. For nobody. As good as they are, if City have their three centre-halves out, no [they don’t win the league]. Three centre-halves of United, no. For the whole season pretty much too, that is how it is. We have fought back a bit, accepted the difficulties and made the best of it. And if we win on Sunday, and if we qualify for the Champions League then we made the best of it. That is it. Look, I don’t know in how many years, but we will look back at our time here and this season is part of our story and our history, definitely. For a long time it looked like this would not be a year they will talk a lot about in the future. ‘OK, that happened and then rest…forget it’. But the boys still did something really special, I have to say. Really special. So definitely that brings you together even more. It will stay like this forever, but going through tough periods makes you stronger as a unit and in that time we didn’t get distracted. Nothing came between us. Yes we had our moments, players were not in the best shape or the best mood. I was not in the best mood but we always found a way to stick together. We never blamed each other or pointed a finger at each other and said ‘it is because of you or you’. We always knew, we came here together, we go through this together and we will get stronger because of it. We have to show that next year obviously in the new season, but we will give it a proper try to use all the experiences from this year as well.”
