Liverpool boss Jürgen Klopp insists his squad could not be more close-knit as they look to play their way out of their current slump in form.
The Reds went out of the FA Cup on Sunday evening, losing 3-2 to Manchester United at Old Trafford in the fourth round. Mohamed Salah scored both goals for Liverpool but strikes from Mason Greenwood, Marcus Rashford and Bruno Fernandes were enough to give the hosts the victory after an entertaining match.
That result means Liverpool have now won just once in their last seven games and that was in the FA Cup third round against Aston Villa’s youth players.
Speaking at his post-match press conference at Old Trafford, Klopp was asked if he trusted this group of players to find their form again:
“There’s no doubt about my trust. But trust doesn’t mean we are not critical of ourselves, it’s not that I say, ‘You did everything right in the last few years so now I don’t care if you made some mistakes.’ That’s not like this. We are really in the situation 100 per cent. But you don’t have to worry about us, as a group we are really together. We know it. If I have a problem, we have a problem. If one player has a problem, we have a problem. That’s all our problem at the moment so we have to sort it together and that’s what we will do. Nobody thinks about the very good things that happened in the last few years – nobody. We are just in this moment and try to win football games again. That’s all.”
When asked how he felt about going out of the FA Cup, Klopp was keen to take a realistic view of the performance, the positives with the negatives:
“You could see the boys really wanted to change the fortune, they wanted to score goals and that’s good. We did that, we scored twice, which is good as well. That’s all OK but in the end they scored three, we scored two and they are through and we are not. That’s a fact as well. We can take positives out of this game, of course – I saw a lot of steps in the right direction and that’s all good. It was good preparation for the Tottenham game with their counter-attacking threat. We know exactly what we have to work on. If you are in a situation you don’t like, you want to get out of it. We want to get out of it and for that we have to make steps. Tonight we made these steps – not the final ones, but we made steps and that’s for the moment OK.”
Liverpool travel to play Spurs on Thursday night in the Premier League as The Reds look to show they can still maintain a title challenge.
Following the FA Cup exit and Liverpool’s continued run of poor form, that game in London has just taken on a whole new level of importance.
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