I AM NOT THE POPE OF FOOTBALL TACTICS!
Klopp: I can’t tell the other gaffers how to play the game
STYLE is everything for Jurgen Klopp.
Ask him how his team should play and he advocates attacking, exciting football but press him on Jose Mourinho’s more cautious approach and he responds dryly: “I am not the Pope of football tactics.”
The point is clear. He knows there’s a big chance Mourinho’s Manchester United side will arrive at Anfield tomorrow looking to counter Liverpool’s high press by using the high ball... straight to the head of Marouane Fellaini and Romelu Lukaku.
The stats say as much. In their 2-1 win over the Mersey men last season – at home, too – Mourinho’s side had 32 per cent possession, the lowest they have ever recorded in the Premier League. After they scored the second, it was actually 27 per cent. Yet even if he would find such an approach distasteful, Klopp refuses to condemn his Old Trafford counterpart.
Instead, he says it is his job to find a solution.
“I’m not the Pope of football tactics. I don’t tell people what they have to do,” said Klopp.
“It is their tactics and we need to find a solution. Is it nice if you have to play against that? That is what makes it smart if they do it.”
Liverpool have not found it easy against United under
Klopp. In the 0-0 at Anfield last season United had only 38 per cent possession but Klopp’s side never looked like scoring. It was a similar story in 2016 when United had just 35 per cent possession in the
0-0 draw.
Yet the Reds boss knows it’s his problem, not Mourinho’s.
“It’s a bit like France in the World Cup,” Klopp said. “Did they play to the potential of the team? The players they had were unbelievable, like Griezmann and Pogba, but did they play bam, bam, bam like Spain? No, they went for the result. The manager Didier Deschamps did everything right.
“As a manager you have to do what you think is right and let other people judge it. “I have nothing to say about it. We have to try to find solutions for problems we don’t know for sure we will have.” Klopp, whose Liverpool team are still unbeaten after 16 Premier League games, also knows that even if Mourinho doesn’t trust his players to execute a more expansive game, they have the quality to do so.
“There is speed, technique, physical strength, pretty much everything,” he said about a United team who go into the weekend 16 points below Liverpool.
“They still have De Gea in goal, unbelievable. They have strikers like Rashford (left), Lukaku, Lingard, Martial – they have unbelievable quality. We don’t judge the points they have, we judge the quality they have, and we have to prepare for that.
“I don’t think Jose Mourinho ever has any lack of ambition, ever.”
Klopp has revealed that Trent Alexander-Arnold is the latest member of his record-breaking back four to suffer an injury problem.
The England right-back is a doubt for the showdown with United with an ankle problem. Centre-backs Joe Gomez and Joel Matip are also out, while stand-in right-back Nathaniel Clyne is only just on the way back from injury.
Liverpool have shipped just six goals in their opening 16 games, a Premier Leasgue record
Klopp, when asked if he was facing a defensive crisis, said: “No. A crisis is only a crisis if you feel it is a crisis.”
James Milner is likely to play at right-back, as he did in the 4-0 win at Bournemouth.