Jurgen Klopp concedes “too many performances below normal level”

Jurgen Klopp offered an honest assessment of Liverpool’s performance in the defeat at Leicester, with “too many performances below normal level” to achieve the desired result.

The Reds were off the pace at the King Power and while clear cut chances went begging, it was a lethargic display that was in contrast to the six-day break that was afforded to Liverpool.

Leicester capitalised and the consensus was that they were deserving of their win in the eyes of both Klopp and Virgil van Dijk, with Liverpool simply “not good enough.”

And the manager was blunt in his view that too many of his players were below the standard expected of them, lapses that cannot be afforded in a tight title race.

“There were too many performances below normal level. My job is to figure these kind of things out before the game. Who is in shape and all these kind of things,” Klopp told the BBC.

“So often these boys gave me the opportunity to say ‘wow, what a game!’ – tonight it’s ‘wow!’ but in completely the other way.

“It didn’t look good. It didn’t look like us, and that’s obviously the one thing we have to think about and change immediately.”

With Chelsea up next, that is the only option for a Liverpool side who must learn from their mistakes on Tuesday night, with Klopp saying the “first thing is not to do it ever again like this.”

“It was well deserved [for Leicester],” Klopp told Amazon Prime. “It was a very strange game. We were just not good enough.

“We still had enough chances. What we did with the balls was just not right. We played a really bad game, so it was well deserved.

“Our decision-making [was poor], maybe a little bit of luck [was missing]. That’s how it is. We should have had more of those moments. We had enough to get the win, but if you lose you need more of them.

“It’s a big gap [to City]. In this moment it is not my problem. If we play our normal football, Liverpool football, we have the chance to win more football games.

“A defeat is a defeat. We have to learn and we will. The first thing is not to do it ever again like this. We lost our rhythm and weren’t calm enough to get it back. That’s our fault.”