Klopp on Liverpool pre-season: ‘I’m happy with where we are’
We haven’t started the 2022-23 season yet and the Reds have already won a trophy, so a 3-0 defeat for a very young group of players against Ligue 1 Strasbourg really shouldn’t matter at all, and even then, for manager Jurgen Klopp, there are positives to be taken from Sunday’s pre-season finale.
“I said to the boys tonight after the game, I’m really proud of the second half, the reaction,” he said after the game. “Because these boys, in their age brackets, they’re usually still the best and now we’re moving into adult football and I loved the reaction.”
With the final game of pre-season completed, it also means Klopp and the coaching staff can turn their attention to the season which begins next week when Liverpool depart with a trip to London to face newly-promoted Fulham in Premier League. opener.
“When you have a pre-season, I’ve now been in the business long enough that I think I can get a sense of where we are and how good we could be,” Klopp said. “But yesterday the game was a very good sign because we looked really ready, we looked really fit and that’s important. Now we have a full week, and at the end of it I think that we probably have two full weeks for the next two games to prepare.
Liverpool’s 2022 pre-season has had mixed results over the past few weeks, nothing of which really matters except to beat Manchester City in a competition that is definitely very real, at least if you win it, but no one remembers pre-season once the important games have started, and Klopp is happy that they have achieved their goal.
“You have to use pre-season, that’s why we played today and now we have to see that we are preparing well for Fulham because it’s a different game obviously,” he added. “But the boys look good, so I’m happy with where we are.
“A little less injury would be nice – we were a bit unlucky early on, before we really started training, to be honest, and that doesn’t help. But the boys will come back sooner rather than later and then we’ll have a more complete team. But at the moment the boys who are available look really good and lively.