Jürgen Klopp on competing with Manchester City and Pep Guardiola
Jürgen Klopp analysed the challenges of facing Manchester City and Pep Guardiola ahead of Liverpool’s trip to Etihad Stadium.
The Reds visit the team they deposed as Premier League champions last season on Sunday and the boss discussed their next opponents in detail during his pre-match press conference.
Read on to find out what he said…
On whether he learned anything from the sides’ most recent meeting in July…
If you are not 100 per cent focused on the game against City, you will lose big! I’m not sure I needed that game as proof, but that’s 100 per cent the case. It’s the first time we won the league in England so I had no idea how to prepare the next game, actually. I didn’t want to overdo it like ‘Boys, forget it, [forget] what happened three days ago… now it’s City and we can show the whole world blah blah blah’. I didn’t do that, I’m not sure if it was right or wrong. So I know that my boys wanted to win that game, but we were not as focused as we are usually in these games. That says not a lot but explains a little bit. Still we played some good football that night, unfortunately we didn’t score and they scored four times. That’s how it was but it was not the most heavy defeat in my life.
On his personal winning record versus Guardiola and whether coming up against City’s manager brings the best out of him…
Then we should meet much more often! But I’m happy we don’t meet that often, to be honest, because of the quality he and his teams have. No, I’m not aware of any records. I know that we met from time to time and I know we didn’t lose all of them, but I know that all of the games were incredibly difficult, incredibly difficult, they are very intense. That’s the only thing I am concerned about really and not how we played in the last game in the summer or the game before that, whenever it was - that we are just ready to compete in a game.
For that you need to have close-to-perfect organisation and you need to be brave, really brave. Play your own football as well, cause them problems as well. All together it sounds so easy and it’s not rocket science but it’s still really difficult because it is under massive pressure. They cause you pressure but we can do that as well. So it’s just an interesting game always and hopefully it will be interesting as well on Sunday because that would mean we will be good - and that would be the first step in the right direction.
