Jurgen Klopp admits Nat Phillips may leave Liverpool in January. And the Reds manager has likened the improvements the centre-back has made over the last 12 months to those of Robert Lewandowksi during his time at Borussia Dortmund.
Jurgen Klopp said: “I don’t think about the AC Milan game, but I have to mention Nat Phillips. People often ask me which player made the biggest improvements under my leadership, and I say Robert Lewandowski. That’s probably right, but not far off that is Nat Phillips, just in a completely different department. I remember when I saw Nat Phillips first. I spoke to him after the game and he’s one of the smartest players I ever worked with I told him: ‘You know you are not the easiest on the eye, eh?’ But he improved in pretty much everything since, and he’s not playing. Life is sometimes not fair and I can’t blame him. We cannot keep him forever, that’s clear. We needed him, just to be safe, for that half-year. We will see what happens in the window. He was fine doing it because he’s a great guy. But his development is absolutely insane. You saw it last year, you would have said: ‘Nat Phillips, oh my God, he plays in the last line?’ People love him because of his heading but with his feet he is unbelievable. He’s a late starter, but his development is unbelievable. I would sign him for any club except Liverpool because we have him.”
Klopp was also asked about how the new attacking strategy that has seen the Reds rattle in 43 Premier League goals in just 14 games.
Jurgen Klopp added: “It’s a thought process [in the summer]. What can we do? How can we increase the probability of winning football games? That’s the challenge for all of us and that was the challenge we had last season. I think we were in a good place that season after winning the league, and then we lost important players. Could we have done better? Maybe yes, maybe no. That’s not important any more, but we realised just how reliant we were on specific things. I know you mean players, but we mean patterns. You can change the players, but you can still stick to your patterns and philosophy and be all right. For us, that was not possible any more, so we had to adapt. Over the year, we realised in games we had problems which we didn’t have before. When the season was over we were quite positive that the players were coming back and we could build from that. We brought in Ibou (Ibrahima Konate) which was really important to give us the security that similar things [to last season] cannot happen any more. We kept Nat Phillips, which is not too cool for the boy but he’s fine with it. He improved like crazy in the last year. Now we can rely on this kind of spine. Going from there, that protection, we know that the things we do have a clear basis again, and we have to think about how we can use that. That was the point of our [summer] process. We were constantly in a room together in pre-season. It was a long camp, and we had a lot of time to talk about it. It’s clear that the influence of Pep and Vitor [Matos] is massive, because they are brilliant football brains. Pete [Krawietz] is constantly thinking too about how we can use the things we have by analysing everything. If the players feel the benefit, that’s very helpful, but you can only be offensively creative if you have defensive protection. It’s not children’s football, it’s a constant process to find that balance.”
