Press conference'We have to do our job and then we will see what that means'

The Reds have won each of their last seven Premier League fixtures, most recently chalking up a 3-0 victory away at Leicester City on Monday night.

Klopp will serve a touchline ban for the visit of Villa on Saturday afternoon, with his side aiming to keep up pressure in the battle for a top-four finish.

He previewed the 3pm BST kick-off at a press conference on Friday – read a summary of his chat below, in addition to news on his squad’s fitness, the futures of Adrian and Caoimhin Kelleher, and his tributes to the departing Roberto Firmino, Naby Keita, James Milner and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain.

On how much hope he has in the top-four race…

There’s no problem. I never hope, I never had hope for that, I don’t need that. I know that we have to win all the football games and then there’s maybe a chance. A big maybe, but that’s all. I watched the game [Newcastle United’s win over Brighton & Hove Albion] last night but I didn’t watch it and thought when they scored goals and stuff like this that I was disappointed. I was that once in my life and it was when Vincent Kompany fired the ball in the goal [for Manchester City against Leicester City in 2019]. That was the moment, but never around that. It’s not in our hands, whatever they get they deserve, easy as that. So we have to do our job and then we will see what that means. But my hope is not big or lesser than before, because I never had.

On whether it is difficult to keep the momentum going in that case…

No, not at all. For me not, not at all. The biggest prize in football are three points. There’s a misunderstanding that it’s about trophies and stuff like this because that’s true as well definitely, but when you win a football game in a very decisive moment it’s always the same: you go and try everything to win the game and that’s the reward you get, most of the time three points and sometimes a trophy. That’s exactly how I see it. There’s no better reason to go into a football game and want to win it than you could get three points, and that’s what we want. But we know it’s not about us only this story tomorrow, because Aston Villa since Unai [Emery] is there, I don’t know where they would be in the table if he would have been there from the beginning, that’s the truth. They play clear, their football is like Villarreal a little bit when he was there, obviously very successful, difficult to play against, super-confident, now super-settled into what they want to do. So that will be tricky definitely. But it must be tricky for them as well and thank God it became a bit more tricky for opponents recently against us. We should try to make sure that it will happen again.

On what has been the most pleasing aspect of the last few weeks...

So much more fun again, it’s so much more easy to enjoy, that’s the truth. I know I’m a professional football manager, whatever, I should enjoy it all the time – but there are moments when it’s just not that easy. So when things don’t go well, when things don’t go in the right direction, when the games look a bit rusty or whatever or like stiff – and we had all this. It never happens overnight, it can happen from time to time, we spoke about that. And we could shake that all off, to be honest, that’s completely gone.

Everything is back to its best, if you want – not performance-wise already but they go in the right direction as well. But training ground, training sessions, everything, definitely for us it was a re-energiser. Thank God you can see on the pitch as well in moments at least. That’s what we want to keep doing. I think in the end, yes, the results are the most important but what I love is that there were always good reasons why we won the game. We could have drawn here or there because we won a lot of games just with one goal, of course that could have happened. But that wouldn’t have made the performances lesser good. But that we won it showed then as well that we didn’t forget how to win football games in the last five, six months before we found a turnaround. So, it’s good, it’s good for all of us. The weather got better, everything got better.

On whether there will be a difference with him not being on the touchline for Saturday’s game...

Yeah, nobody probably will shout like me at them if they don’t track back. But I will tell the boys if they don’t want me to do that in the future, they just have to do it now without me shouting – I mean like 70th minute or stuff like this, these kind of things. I sit far away but maybe if the game is not good I could make it happen anyway. My voice is alright at least. Yeah, not a lot. I’m really in contact with Vitor [Matos] – Vitor will have the phone or whatever, the headset, so we can speak about everything, substitutions, these kind of things.

And apart from that, Pep [Lijnders] is an incredible coach and he will be out there. I’m not sure how many per cent of the things I shout on the pitch are because the boys saw it before on the screen, on the iPad, Pete [Krawietz] and Pep, and then they come to me, ‘We have to sort this and we have to sort that.’ So now it’s just without the filter, they can do that directly, because I’m the only one who cannot watch it back during the game. Yeah, now I can do that in the stands. How I said, from a watching point of view, it’s a much better position to see the game and with the Southampton game when we played that, it was super-helpful that one of us, in that case me, saw the game from there. I sit next to our analysts – they usually do that – but this time they get a bit of support from me.