UK Edition
Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp refuses to panic as Manchester clubs expose gulf in quality between inter-city rivals
Jurgen Klopp has indicated that the early season success of the Manchester clubs in the Premier League is putting more pressure on Liverpool.
Klopp’s team have suffered a disappointing September, failing to win any of four matches, falling five points adrift of the league leaders and going out of the Carabao Cup at Leicester City on Wednesday.
The manager has acknowledged his team have to improve the way they start matches, having conceded the opening goal in all four of those games, recovering to avoid defeat in two of them as they drew 2-2 with Sevilla in the Champions League nine days ago and 1-1 with Burnley at Anfield last weekend.
Liverpool have struggled to recover from the 5-0 defeat at Manchester City at the start of the month, with Pep Guardiola’s side sharing the Premier League leadership with Manchester United.
Klopp says seven years in charge of Borussia Dortmund, where he was competing with Bayern Munich for trophies, taught him plenty about the pressures of expectation.
Yet he has acknowledged that those pressures have been raised at Liverpool, where the rivalry with Manchester as a city, and with United as a club, is huge.
He said: “Everywhere it is the same, but here it is a little bit more. When the Manchester teams are flying, that makes it even more difficult but I cannot change this.
“What I can do is cool the situation here down and do the right things again and work on the other things. That is how it is always.”
The defensive vulnerability of Klopp’s side has been exposed repeatedly this season, with only two clean sheets earned in nine league and cup games. The manager, though, says that there is no need to panic, arguing that Liverpool have been unlucky in several matches this season, and that it would be hysteria to suggest otherwise.
He said: “You really think there would be one per cent of a reason I would panic? It’s football. We have eight points. In four games, we were the clear better side but we didn’t get the results.
“Now we could panic because of not getting the results or we could say, ‘It’s still not good enough playing football’.
“Do you think any team in the world loves playing against us in this moment? Or do they hope, like Burnley, that they only have to go for set-pieces and get whatever they want and can concede 35 shots on target or whatever and it’s clear they will be lucky?”
Klopp said when he arrived in October 2015 that he aimed to win a major trophy within four years, but so far has been unable to end a wait for the league title stretching back to 1990.
“Obviously it’s difficult here to be number one; they were not number one in the last 25 years,” he said. “But the criticism is always the same, it is, ‘You are playing good football but you have no results’, or, ‘You have the same defending problems as 500 years ago’.
“It’s always the same. You can talk about this but I cannot think like this. I’m not in a panic. It is not a case of sending out a message not to panic because I cannot imagine that anybody thinks about this.”