Klopp Talk: A Lot of “Pride” in Academy Players and Staff
As Liverpool face yet another busy week, Klopp looked back at the last challenge
Speaking ahead of Liverpool’s trip to Nottingham Forest, Liverpool head coach Jürgen Klopp praised the young squad members for their achievements over the past week:
After the game I felt that, definitely, the joy, the pride, it’s really different. It’s wonderful to see how the boys deal with the situation because that’s a full squad achievement. It is, indeed, because I think we all agree if we put all the young boys on the pitch together then they are still wonderful players and they have no chance. So, you need to be led, you need to be guided on the pitch, you need this experience around you – and they all know that. I congratulated the senior players after the game, how they deal with the situation. Because the first half was a first half where you can get frustrated – they were running through, we lost balls here and there, that all can happen, it’s completely normal in football. But it’s all about your own mindset and nobody was in that mood at all. They really enjoyed having them around and knowing about the difficulties and knowing about the opportunities, the possibilities what they give us and all these kind of things. That was wonderful.
But we are not here in general to think too much about these kind of things. Yesterday was a wonderful day. Usually if we win a trophy, we do a staff picture – I don’t know why we didn’t do that in the past – but yesterday we did it 100 per cent with the full Academy staff as well, so there was a lot of people in here and we had this picture. It was wonderful because I really wanted everybody to feel it and to understand it properly about the role they played in that whole story, and that was really cool. But two days later we play Nottingham Forest and now it’s tomorrow already, so we have to find solutions. I said, it’s a tricky time, a challenging time but somehow we could keep it very positive and that’s what we have to do. But then the games are the most difficult moments, obviously, in that [and] there we have to be ready.
If you would ask me and I wanted to answer, ‘What’s the definite line-up for tomorrow?’ I couldn’t give you that answer now – it’s 12.30 on minus one – because we just have to stay flexible in these things and then we have to trust in the process and the things we do, and that worked out. Not over 90 minutes but when it didn’t work out, we had either a defensive leg somewhere for a block or Caoimh [Kelleher] with a sensational save, and that’s how football is. When you are not in your best moment, you have to keep games open until you can win them. These moments come up in a game if you stay clear but it’s not always easy to keep that mindset and that’s what the boys did, all of them, and that’s the part I am really proud of. But that’s already [the] past because we have to prove that point tomorrow again.
Of course, injuries alone don’t explain Klopp’s reliance on young players, with a busy February schedule posing an incredible challenge:
Yeah, yeah, but it was always like that. Until we get asked about four possible trophies, we don’t think for a second about it, to be 100 per cent honest. These kind of things, you don’t think about it for one second, it’s not important, absolutely not. You try to find a solution for the next game, we try to win the game. Take it game by game, that’s probably really a phrase journalists don’t like too much, but we cannot do it differently. We just have to make sure we get through all these different situations with as many points as somehow possible – that’s what we do, that’s what we will do. Let’s see how it works out tomorrow.
There’s another busy week ahead. Here we go...
Source: liverpooloffside.sbnation.com
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