Press conferenceJürgen Klopp on Mane confidence, Salah mindset and wide play

Mane is seeking to end a run without a goal for the Reds since November 20, while Salah saw a penalty saved during the Premier League defeat at Leicester City earlier this week.

The manager was quizzed about how both will go about responding during his pre-match media previews, which were conducted before he returned a suspected positive COVID-19 test result.

Read a summary of the chat below…

On Mane’s current confidence levels…

Sadio has no problem with confidence but of course the momentum in finishing-wise is not there in the moment. You can see that. Otherwise, Sadio plays really well. Actually, a funny story – this morning one of our analysts knocked on my door and asked, ‘Boss, do you have two minutes? I actually made a video to show Sadio how much he contributes to our game and how good he is in this moment, how good he is there, how good he is in these situations.’ Obviously the intention was to show he should not be too worried that the finishing is in the moment not there, but he is still an incredibly important player for us. That’s actually the view we have on it.

As a striker – most, I wouldn’t say all but pretty much all strikers had to go through these kinds of things. It happened to Sadio before, he came out of that, he scored for us incredibly important goals and I’m pretty positive that he has a good chance to score one on Sunday. After that he is then away for a few weeks and then he is coming back and then we can talk about all the things. For this game now, it’s all fine. He is too important for us that we only would think about these kinds of things. You have to take these kinds of things from time to time and then after that it will be good again. We work on it football-wise but it’s not about now talking, pointing the finger and making it bigger than it is, all these kinds of things. We missed other chances as well, but of course we all know Sadio finished situations off – or more difficult situations off – for us already in other moments. They are human beings, that’s how it is.

On how Salah reacts to incidents such as the missed penalty against Leicester…

We don’t have now a lot of experience with Mo dealing with a ‘crisis’ or whatever because he didn’t have to. With the penalty, it just makes him more greedy to score a goal in the game usually. It didn’t happen in that game but, how I said, we didn’t play a really good game. He had another really good chance; if we bring him more often in promising chances, I’m pretty sure he would have finished one of them off. Missing a penalty is tough, especially now you have the rebound as well and it goes on the crossbar, that’s of course unlucky, no doubt about that. But that’s it pretty much.

They are top, top, top-class players and they deal constantly with failure. That’s our life. If you would know in the best game the boys play, how many things didn’t work out and they have to deal with it during a game. That’s what you learn pretty early as a footballer and the better you are the more often you will fail because you come constantly in these decisive moments and none of us – nobody of us – succeeded in all difficult situations. Yeah, that’s how it is. I’m not sure but Kobe Bryant is still the one player with the most missed situations in the NBA history and is anyway one of the greatest players ever. You have to try it, you have to come into these situations, then you can fail. If you fail there, no problem, go again and everything will be fine. That’s pretty much the mindset Mo is in – and Sadio as well, by the way.

On Liverpool’s philosophy in using wide areas during games…

I don’t want to go too much in detail, to be honest, about our playing philosophy. Using the wide areas, yes, is important. They are there so it’s a part of the pitch like all other areas as well, but we still know the goal is pretty central. That means actually you use the width to attack the centre, that’s pretty much the sum-up of what we try to do. All the things end up in the centre and that’s where it should end up. How you get there is obviously not a massive difference. There are differences obviously, let me say it like this. Chelsea play a different system so they have the wings occupied by wing-backs. We do that with full-backs. [Manchester] City are doing that with wingers. It’s just a different set-up with different positional players in a similar area. That’s it. If we are on top of our game it’s difficult to deal with. If Chelsea are on top of their game it’s difficult to deal with. If City are on top of their game it’s difficult to deal with. They score more often from these positions, from the wide positions, like [Marcos] Alonso famously, Reece James scored a lot of goals. We prepare more from there but that’s it, pretty much.