A second half dismissal of Alexis Sanchez shortly after Inter’s goal helped the home side to see out the match and book their place in the next round.
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Jurgen Klopp saw his Liverpool side just about scrap their way through to qualify for the Champions League quarterfinals on Tuesday night. Coming into the pulsating clash, the Reds had a healthy 2-0 lead which they acquired from the first leg in Italy. However, Simone Inzaghi’s Inter Milan side registered a shock 1-0 victory at Anfield on Tuesday thanks to Lautaro Martinez’s strike. Despite the defeat, Liverpool qualified to the last-8 stage with a 2-1 victory on aggregate. A second half dismissal of Alexis Sanchez shortly after Inter’s goal helped the home side to see out the match and book their place in the next round of the European competition. However, Jurgen Klopp believes that Sanchez could have also been sent off in the first half after producing a knee-high challenge on Thiago Alcantara.
“I don’t understand why we have to discuss that. If you played football, if you can win the ball only, if you bring yourself in a position that you endanger the opponent then you don’t win the ball. That’s it. If Fab goes in with the same intention, with a long leg, then both players get injured. Fab is there because he judged the ball that if he is not flying in, then I will get it. But because Sanchez is flying in and yeah, he touched the ball – that’s possible – but in the end he cannot stop and hit Fab in a really bad way, to be honest. I think he was quite lucky that he didn’t get a different colour [card] in the first half for a foul on Thiago, leg that high against the knee, similar situation. Passion is good, absolutely good, but if it leads to these kind of things it just doesn’t help,” Klopp said in his post-match press conference.
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Klopp then analysed the game and believed that Liverpool deserved to qualify over the two legs. “Pete Krawietz always says the art of football is to lose the right games. I still hate it but if there was any kind of game we could have afforded to lose, it was tonight because the main target obviously of this competition is to get through. But it’s not that I’m here like over the moon. I’m really happy that we went through because obviously when we saw the draw in the first place it was like, ‘OK, that’s a tough one’,” he added.
“So we went through and I think over the two legs we deserved it. That’s fine. That we had some problems in the game tonight was [for] different reasons, one is the quality of the opponent – they are a really good football team. And their set-up – we know that in the league a little bit from Leeds under Bielsa – just with much more quality and that makes it really tricky to play against them. But we still had our chances and didn’t score.”
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