KLOPP: I WILL QUIT RATHER THAN CHEAT

JURGEN KLOPP has warned he will walk away from football if his side has to resort to gamesmanship.

Liverpool boss Klopp watched the Reds squander a winning position for the second time in four days when Chelsea snatched a fluke equaliser five minutes from the end of a pulsating contest.

Klopp said that referee Michael Oliver (above) accused him of time-wasting and stopped him from making a substitution, which the German claimed would have prevented the Chelsea leveller.

The fourth official responded by suggesting he had asked Liverpool six times if they wanted to make the change. But Klopp, who wanted to send on Adam Lallana (below), said he would rather quit than see his team use cynical tactics to break up games.

“We try to close games down, but we don’t do it in a cynical way,” said Klopp.

“We don’t tell players to fall to the ground – the day somebody thinks like this is the day I stop.

“Watch a few of our games and you will see that we don’t do that. We have had one red card all season, and even that was unlucky.”

Liverpool have often been accused of lacking the street-smarts the top teams adopt to see games out. Chelsea are masters of breaking games up when ahead but, in Seville last Tuesday and then at Anfield on Saturday, the Reds seemed naïve.

Klopp, though, was incredulous that anyone would think his side should adopt such cynical tactics.

He said: “If it’s not OK any longer just to try your best, then there is something wrong with the game.

“I watched a game yesterday and players were always on the ground. “That’s not my kind of game. “Yes, you have to be smart, yes you have to be clever in different situations, but we didn’t think about time-wasting at all. We didn’t do it at that moment with the Lallana substitution.

“All we wanted to do was make a change because Adam needed to tell the other players about a change in our system.”