Up the angry work, Klopp tells Reds
LIVERPOOL
the Champions League virtually secured, Klopp says his players need to guard against turning soft.
“When you have a good moment you keep it going, that’s the most difficult thing,” said the Reds manager. “You’re having a good run and you have all this press work to do, all this LFC TV and all that stuff, they are all so positive, then we start doing the funny things so you get completely soft.
“I said it before the game in the meeting. If this would be the first day of the season and we would know as much as we do now about each other, that would be a perfect world.
“Now we know so much about each other, now we like each other, now we have better times with each other in private and on the football pitch.
“Now we need to stay angry with the rest of the world, we need to stay aggressive.
“At the beginning of the season you don’t have a lot of laughter in the dressing room, it’s not like everyone is laughing all the time.
“Now when we eat it is like, ‘Come on, please, settle’. They don’t enjoy it too much but I don’t want to wait until I see it, then go, ‘Now we got soft’.
“You lose a little bit if you win all the time. We didn’t win all the time but two, three or four weeks in a row and then it’s hard to win the fifth one as well, to stay on track and do it.”
Michail Antonio pulled one back for West Ham but it is now 15 visits to Anfield with no win for Hammers boss David Moyes, who gave a debut to Patrice Evra.
“It’s really difficult to deal with them,” said Moyes.
“We’ve worked most of the week to try and find a way of making sure we could contain them the best we could.
“There were parts of the game when we did. But Salah is definitely one you feel can make the difference. The things he does, it’s always the job to try and stop him.”
LIVERPOOL (4-3-3):
SAM ALLARDYCE claims too many of his Everton flops are failing to live up to their over-inflated price tags.
Majority shareholder Farhad Moshiri shelled out about £150million last summer to make Everton the fifth biggest spenders in Europe. And he financed another splurge in January, bringing in Theo Walcott and Cenk Tosun for a combined £47m.
But Allardyce believes Everton spent over the odds for some signings – and they are not currently proving they were worth the money.
His side drew another blank against Watford, managing just two shots on target as Troy Deeney scored the only goal of the game and have now lost four in a row away from Goodison Park.
Allardyce said: “Everton are in an inflated price bracket because everyone knew they had got money to spend so every player they went for ended up at a certain price for Everton. I would say the players need to be dealing with it more for the money we’ve paid for them.”
Victory was twice as sweet for goalkeeper Orestis Karnezis, who was at fault as his side threw away a two-goal lead to lose 3-2 at Goodison in November on his debut.
Karnezis, who is on loan from Udinese, said: “When you lose you don’t sleep well. You are thinking about what you have done. But I will sleep well now.”
WATFORD (4-3-3):