LIVERPOOL manager Jurgen Klopp has praised his team for advancing to the round of 16 of the UEFA Champions League with two group games to spare.
The Reds comfortably won the supposedly hardest group in the competition with four wins from four games, including a 2-0 victory at Anfield over Spanish champions Atletico Madrid on Wednesday night.
Klopp was pleased with his team’s performance on Wednesday night and overall in the group phase.
“If Bobby Firmino wouldn’t have gone off with a hamstring injury that would have been much better,” the German told journalists.
“But from pretty much all other points of view, it was a good performance, it’s an incredible group stage so far. I wouldn’t have expected that obviously when I saw the draw – nobody would have expected that. Doing that is pretty special.
But for tonight, job done but we all know there are two games to go and we will try everything to win them as well. That’s how it is.”
One of the scorers on the night Sadio Mane was taken off at half-time and Klopp explained that the move was to prevent the Senegal forward from receiving a red card after Atletico had been reduced to 10 men following Felipe’s dismissal.
He said: “Probably everybody in the stadium expected I would do it, each journalist expected I would do it and I thought it was the right thing to do.
I hated it more than you can imagine because Sadio played an incredible game, but then what’s the decision? I was not worried that Sadio cannot handle his emotions, he was calm. The thing is, the ball comes in the air, you go in for a heading challenge and the other player is going down… we all saw what some Madrid players did, rolling over more and more in all the situations to equal the number of players again. I didn’t like it, but I think it was the right thing to do.”
With Liverpool through as group winners, Klopp has the luxury of resting key players for the remaining two fixtures, and he hinted that he would do just that.
“The team we line up depends on the situation we are in around the game,” the former Borussia Dortmund manager said.
“Who was how in the game before, who is the next opponent. That was always [the case], it’s not now just for these games, that’s how it is. We changed five times tonight because we don’t consider the Madrid game more important than the West Ham game, for example, so you have to make changes even when players might not like it in a specific moment.
“The Porto game, there is only one difference: we are already qualified. Forget that because we already qualified but all the rest is exactly like it was before. It is a Champions League game, the next one is at home, the game after that is at the San Siro and I’ve never played there, so I’m really excited about that.
“We will play at home [against Porto] and play real football. Can you imagine we play Porto at home, the crowd is really coming from all over the world to watch the games and then you offer, I don’t know, a half-cooked dish? That is pretty not much how it will be. We go for it, we want to win football games, that’s all. Sometimes you can qualify for something, sometimes not, it is still the same thing – you play a game, you want to win it, show it.”
