Jürgen Klopp on Reds' seven-goal Maribor win: 'It was better than good!'

The Reds significantly bolstered their hopes of progress in Group E with a commanding triumph in Slovenia – their biggest ever away win in European competition.

Roberto Firmino, Philippe Coutinho and Mohamed Salah (2) all struck to give the visitors a four-goal lead by the half-time interval.

Firmino nodded in a fifth after the break before substitute Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain claimed his first for the club with a close-range finish.

Trent Alexander-Arnold wrapped up the scoring at the end – and afterwards, Klopp spoke of his satisfaction at the manner in which Liverpool produced such a clinical display.

Read on for a summary of his post-match press conference at the Ljudski Vrt stadium…

On his thoughts on the performance…

Good, or even better [than that]. From the first second it was exactly what we wanted to do. We wanted to show the best counter-pressing of the last few weeks because I really thought that protecting our offensive movements, patterns and all that stuff were already really good against United but we could have done even better in counter-pressing. Tonight we did much better and against a football-playing side like Maribor, it made a lot of sense. We scored the first goal from a pressing situation and a few other goals were after a counter-pressing situation, so it helped a lot. Then, how we finished these situations was also good. A lot this season already [we have been] alone in the box to make a cross or a pass, but were not relaxed enough to play the right pass. Tonight it was different. Always when we let them play, they played immediately and were around our 18-yard box and that only showed how good they could be. But we never gave up in this game, especially in the second half. It was good – all-round a really, really good performance otherwise you cannot win 7-0 – so we are really happy about that.

On Oxlade-Chamberlain opening his Reds account…

It helps a lot – he could have scored two. It was nice from Daniel [Sturridge], how he made this goal, it was really cool and I liked it. The performance was very active, [he] had crosses, was involved not immediately – obviously we forgot a fresh player was on the right wing so we didn’t involve him from the beginning. When they recognised that Ox was now there he was really involved and it was good.

On setting a new club record…

I was told immediately after the game, I had no idea actually. We spoke a few times about how the wonderful history of this club can sometimes feel like a backpack so it’s nice to write history, and it will probably be difficult to beat that. It’s quite rare that you win 7-0 but it shows again we did unbelievably well tonight. I think Maribor was quite confident before the game because of different reasons [and] because they are a very good team. We could read the newspaper today here because my assistant can read the language, and I asked him, 'What do they write?' They were quite confident because an English team had never won in Maribor so that’s obviously another thing that we did for the first time. I think, really, the boys deserved that because they really kept on going. It’s just good to work together but the only problem is that you always have to explain why you didn’t win. It’s probably not the most difficult thing to explain, especially after our games because you see we created the chances but we did not use them. That’s not enough for you, how you know, and then you put the finger on all the other problems we sometimes had. So, it was a challenge and it will be a challenge to stay confident in this league. We try to use the result now, but the next game is against Tottenham so it’s pretty likely it will not be a similar result. But no problem, we have four or five days to recover and prepare for the game, so that’s good and we are already looking forward to it.