Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp has explained why he failed to sign a centre-half after the Reds missed out on Virgil van Dijk.
The Reds were heavily linked with a move for the Dutch defender – however they ended their interest after Southampton threatened to report them for making an allegedly illegal approach for the player.
Defence was Liverpool’s Achilles heel last season; and their defensive woes continued after they shipped in five goals last weekend to Manchester City, after Sadio Mane’s sending off, and let a goal lead slip against Sevilla in the Champions League.
However, Jurgen Klopp was adamant that he could not find the right alternative to Van Dijk and insisted that the players he watched would not have improved his side.
Klopp said: ‘We watched all of them 500 million times, but what if the new player doesn’t hit the first ball and he makes exactly the same mistake?
‘It is not that we ignore it. I said if there would have been a solution out there, we would have done it. I had to make a decision and the decision was our boys are not worse than them.’
Klopp also took aim at his critics, who feel that he affords too much trust in his current players:
‘I believe in trust. I trust people until they give me an opportunity or a possibility not to trust them anymore. That’s how I understand life. My job is really to get the best out of these boys.
‘Oh yeah, sometimes they make bulls**t, and we are not happy. Sometimes [there are] goals I’m angry about, and it’s not the first one. Of course, you wish we could have done [things] differently, but that can happen.’
He also defended Dejan Lovren and made a passionate defence about his struggling centre-halves:
‘Dejan is not 18 any more. He’s a man, he’s a father of two kids. He can deal with it.
‘Really, with all this about [our defenders], go out there and ask other teams whether they’d like to pick them. You would be really surprised.’
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