Jürgen Klopp felt there were some positives to be taken from Liverpool’s performance, but acknowledged his side made ‘decisive errors’ as they were beaten 3-2 by Manchester United in the FA Cup on Sunday.
Liverpool went in front after 18 minutes of the fourth-round tie at Old Trafford through a sublime dinked effort from Mohamed Salah.
The hosts leveled soon after, however, when Mason Greenwood finished a counter-attack before Marcus Rashford put them ahead after the break.
Liverpool equalised through Salah just prior to the hour mark, but Bruno Fernandes’ free-kick with 12 minutes to go settled the outcome of the contest.
Afterwards, Klopp said:
“It’s not what we wanted, so it’s frustrating. If you want to win tonight, you have to play at your absolute top. We weren’t on our absolute top, but we made a lot of steps in the right direction. The start of the game was good, but then we made decisive mistakes; around the first goal United scored, we had too many options offensively and no protection. We lost the ball and then there was a counter-attack. It was not the first counter-attack in the game, so we have to improve that. You could see the boys really wanted to change the fortune, they wanted to score goals and that’s good. We did that, we scored twice, which is good as well. That’s all OK but in the end they scored three, we scored two and they are through and we are not. That’s a fact as well. We can take positives out of this game, of course – I saw a lot of steps in the right direction and that’s all good. It was good preparation for the Tottenham game with their counter-attacking threat. We know exactly what we have to work on. If you are in a situation you don’t like, you want to get out of it. We want to get out of it and for that, we have to make steps. Tonight we made these steps – not the final ones, but we made steps and that’s for the moment OK.
On whether confidence is an issue, Klopp said:
I don’t want to make that every week now. Tonight I didn’t see any confidence problems. But what we said is when you don’t score for a while it’s not good for the confidence, obviously. The best strikers in the world can tell you they all had moments when they didn’t score with each chance. But it’s all about how you deal with it. We are on it, believe me, and we will sort that. – Agency report.
