Both sides will be eager to start the new campaign on a positive note after enduring below-average season last time around.
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The new Premier League season could not begin in a better way than how it will be for Liverpool and Chelsea this weekend. The two heavyweights of English football will go head to head with each other on Sunday at Stamford Bridge. Ever since the fixtures list was announced, this was the one that stood out. Both sides will be eager to start the new campaign on a positive note after enduring below-average season last time around.
Liverpool had finished outside the top-four places, while Chelsea not only missed out on Europe altogether, they ended up outside the top half of the 2022-23 Premier League standings. With Chelsea set to begin a new era under Mauricio Pochettino, Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp spoke about what to expect from him and his side. Asked about Chelsea and the impact of Pochettino’s arrival, Klopp, quoted by the club’s website, said, “Of course not, we don’t know [the impact]. It’s two, I think, really good football teams, very talented football teams, [who] will face each other.”
“We watched obviously Chelsea on the tour, whatever we could get from there, from the last games they played, the Dortmund game [and] Newcastle game. A lot of good things. You can see that, it’s a really talented team, that’s what we have to prepare for. It’s a home game for them, the first home game after a long break, if you want, after a disappointing season, that’s all clear. So they want to show up, definitely. New manager, Poch is a top manager, so they will show up. We have to be ready. We have to be absolutely ready. The football they played you can see it – Poch is there.”
Klopp also extended his sympathy to Chelsea after it was recently announced that their star forward Christopher Nkunku will be out injured for a good while. “We played against Mauricio often when he was at Tottenham, so you can see a lot of similarities from that time and in the end we don’t know exactly. I think Nkunku was a key part of the plans. Very unfortunate for the boy and for Chelsea with his bad injury. I think that was something they really planned with, but they have really good options offensively to solve that. Let’s see,” he elaborated.
He added: “It’s the first football game, real competitive football game for us this season. We don’t want to waste time, or whatever, we really want to go for it, but we have to see how it goes. Everybody asks, and I am more than 20 years in the business, it’s always the first game, people say you don’t know where you stand exactly, I’m not really interested, to be honest. I want us to 100 per cent [see] what we have that day and from there we go. I think we should give it a proper try.”
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