Liverpool produced an impressive performance to get past Atletico 3-2 when the two sides met a couple of weeks ago.
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Jurgen Klopp and Liverpool will be bracing themselves for a tough Champions League tie against Atletico Madrid. The Reds produced an impressive performance to get past Atletico 3-2 when the two sides met a couple of weeks ago in the Spanish capital. In his pre-match press conference on Tuesday, Klopp opened up about what to expect from the Spanish champions in the reverse tie at Anfield. “Similar intensity. Atletico never I don’t know, in the history since Diego [Simeone] is there, they never played a friendly game, so we should not expect that. The situation in the group sets the level as well, so it’s clear Atleti probably need three points – or think they need three points – and stuff like this and we want to win the game with all we have.”
“We are at home and it is so long ago we played a home game in the Champions League; it was AC Milan, which was four or five weeks ago or something like that. We were so happy last year when we qualified for the Champions League because we knew we would have nights like this, so now a night like this is coming and we should celebrate it in a football way together with our supporters. Atletico is a good team, a very good team, an incredibly good team, everybody knows [that] difficult to play against, everybody knows [that] but we will give it a try.”
Klopp was then asked about Liverpool’s defensive record in recent matches. “We aren’t perfect, I know that. I knew that before. We have to defend situations better, that’s absolutely clear and no doubt about that. But we had before, I don’t know how many clean sheets Ali had already this season. We cannot always make these discussions because of one game. You beat United 5-0 and the world is very rosy and then in the next moment you draw 2-2 against Brighton and you have massive problems. It is neither nor,” he explained.
“We have to improve, that’s what we know. Against Brighton, the best way of defending would have been to keep the ball, to play football we played in our good periods, in the first half especially. That’s what we didn’t do and that was my problem. I knew before the game that we would have problems in moments against Brighton because all teams had it so far.
“That’s the quality of Brighton; they don’t finish those situations off always but against us they did and that’s why they deserved a point. It has nothing to do with tomorrow, but that we have to defend in general better, we knew that before. We work on that and we better do it tomorrow night because Atletico are a pretty good football team.”
When asked how significant it would be to qualify from the group with two games to spare, he replied, “Of course it would be big, it’s just that we usually don’t have to talk about these kind of things because we usually have a final in the group and I hope that will not happen this year like with the last matchday of the group stage when we need a 1-0 or something like and it is not allowed the opponent scores at all. Of course, we want to avoid that but we cannot make the second step before the first step – and the first step is to win against Atletico and that’s already difficult enough,” he explained.
