ReactionJürgen Klopp on SV Darmstadt 98 victory and Chelsea preparation

The Reds recorded a win against the newly promoted Bundesliga outfit at Deepdale Stadium on Monday night to close out their pre-season friendly fixtures.

Liverpool will next travel to face Chelsea on Sunday afternoon, as they open up their 2023-24 Premier League campaign versus the Blues at Stamford Bridge.

Read on to see what the boss told Liverpoolfc.com post-match on the Darmstadt win, pre-season and Chelsea...

Liverpool 3-1 Darmstadt: Watch highlights

On the result and his team's performance...

We had pretty much all the situations already. When you win the last pre-season game five or six-nil and everything clicks and you think, 'Oh my god...' but that was obviously not the case. We did a lot of good stuff, obviously, could have scored many more goals. We conceded again one which we shouldn't concede, but it's an obvious mistake which we spoke already about. But that's how it is with mistakes, if you do it once, you talk about it, you work on it [but] that doesn't mean you sort it immediately.

The situation is clear, the diagonal protection is not there. We cannot avoid each pass in behind our line, we just have to make sure that we are then in better positions. Besides that, we scored two goals after set-pieces, which is important. We could have scored one from a high-press situation, which is good as well and besides that we played a lot of good stuff without finishing the situations off. With the physical state I am really happy, we looked really fresh, looked really good - now, in the next five or six days, we have to find a formation for the Chelsea game, not for the whole season, and then we go from there. All OK, nobody got injured, so that's the most important thing. We came through so far OK and that's good.

On Alexis Mac Allister playing as a No.6...

He's a top-class player; on the ball [and] without the ball. We had our moments where we were a bit too open, that's clear, but we are not used to it. That's why I said we had to work on it. We will do that. We have to try it and test a couple of different things. Yes, in a compact formation, Alexis can play there, definitely. If he's there alone, should he play there? No. But now he showed just how good a footballer he is and how good he understands the game because he played here now [for] the first time for us at least and he did really well.

On being in a good place with pre-season finished...

Yeah, so there is some football stuff we have to do and maybe have to sort, definitely. But that's normal. The pre-season never ends after the first Premier League game. It always goes at least until the first international break. After that we should be then in a different position, that's clear. We have to use these full weeks without international football [which is] what we will do. We could, especially in Germany, train a lot on the physical part and on the tactical stuff and that's really helpful.

[We] came out of the tour without big problems and so here we go again. It's not done and dusted. We have four [or] five really important sessions until Chelsea, but then we have to make sure we put a proper fight in there. That's exactly what we wanted from the first day of the pre-season, so let's go.