Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp gave a damning assessment of his team’s heavy 4-1 defeat to Napoli in the Champions League on Wednesday night, admitting the Reds need to ‘reinvent’ themselves and improve in ‘pretty much everything’.
It was an incredibly lacklustre performance from Liverpool as a team.
Joe Gomez was so poor in the first half that he was withdrawn at the interval, while Trent Alexander-Arnold barely seemed interested. Fabinho and Virgil van Dijk were also unusually poor, while Klopp even lost patience with Mohamed Salah an hour into the contest.
“It looks like we need to reinvent ourselves. There’s a lot of things lacking. We have to try to find a set up to be much better in pretty much everything,” Klopp conceded in post-match media duties.
“Not that difficult to explain when you saw the game. Napoli played a really good game and we didn’t. That’s the first explanation. Not compact defensively or offensively. Until Thiago entered the pitch I can’t remember one counter-pressing situation. We were just too wide.”
Looking ahead to the weekend, Klopp also said, “In three days, we play Wolves. When they saw the game, they cannot stop laughing probably. They were probably thinking that’s the perfect moment [to play Liverpool]. I would say it’s the perfect moment.”
After a mixed bag of results in pre-season, the defeat to Napoli means that Liverpool have failed to win in five of their eight games so far in 2022/23 across all competitions – including victory in the Community Shield against Manchester City at the end of July.
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