Liverpool FC – Jürgen Klopp’s verdict on Napoli 4-1 Liverpool

Whether he should ‘reinvent’ the team…

Look, like I said, you don’t think much after the game, you react more. So when I said it’s true, we definitely have to reinvent ourselves because only the basics weren’t there. It’s a difficult period, no doubt about it, but if you don’t play exceptionally well, you can still defend at a very high level, we should be able to and of course we are, but at the moment we are nice , among. The start of the game doesn’t help, so if we want to defend better, take a penalty after three minutes and the next one I’m not sure when… then clearly you can’t do that exactly. So it’s like you’re in the middle, tonight we were in the middle, if you like.

But still, it’s a job to do and that’s what I mean so we have to reinvent a new kind of football. You’re always trying to improve, but right now everyone would of course be happy if you could play the same as what we used to play, let me put it this way. Tonight that was the least compact performance I’ve seen from us in a long, long time and it was just, again Napoli was really good but we made it easy for them. We lost the ball in areas and then the next situation was a counter-attack, but that’s not how it should be. A few things are really clear. We need to change that and the reason why it is now [is] it’s also getting a little clearer, but I need time to just say the right things, not 100 percent at the moment.

Whether a defensive high line was a ‘risk’ against Napoli…

The high line is a risk if you don’t pressure and use the ball. If you have a high line and you don’t pressure the guy with the ball, yes, then it’s a risk. But that is usually not the case, the problem is not the high line, we need a high line to be compact, the problem is that we were never close enough to put pressure on the opponent.