Jurgen Klopp praised the character shown by Liverpool as they returned to the Premier League summit with a 3-1 win over Burnley. The Reds won 3–1 at Anfield in front of a league record crowd. The home side started the last game with a defeat to Arsenal, while Manchester City moved to the top of the table after beating Everton earlier in the day.
Meanwhile, Liverpool have been ruled out by injury, illness and the competition, with key players Alisson Becker, Ibrahima Konate, Dominic Szoboszlai and Mo Salah missing.And despite Burnley remaining in the relegation zone, Liverpool had to push for all three points.
Diogo Jota opened the scoring for the Reds in the 31st minute, but the Clarets equalized through Dara O’Shea just before the break.But United regained the lead through Luis Diaz and, after Burnley wasted several chances, Darwin Nunes equalized 10 minutes from time.
Liverpool manager Klopp said of the win: “It’s not difficult to fight for a result. In fact, I can’t remember the last time it wasn’t like that. But today it was clear that for reasons both obvious and less obvious, this was going to be a very difficult dream.
It was about how we did, how much character we could show and whether the kids showed us what they needed. At the beginning of the game we rushed too much. The problem was that we played too fast, too direct, we couldn’t react as a team and we couldn’t win the ball back.
They’ve backed off a bit and it doesn’t look good.”We scored a goal. Was awesome. They were finding their way into the game but missed the equalizer in the final moments, almost at half-time. But 1-1 is not a problem. We wanted to play better football.” And to play calm football, fortunately we had two chances – one diagonally to Virg [van Dijk] and Trent [Alexander-Arnold] when the winger came in. “We gave the ball away , we played with the right players, they were in the right positions and we succeeded.
“Liverpool suffered a setback at half-time when Trent Alexander-Arnold was ruled out with a knee injury. With Konate, Joe Gomez, Conor Bradley and Joel Matip all out, it means central midfielder Curtis Jones will have to act as a makeshift right-back. Klopp believed Jones “did exceptionally well”. He added: “The problem at half-time was we had to get Trent off. A double awkward situation arises.
One is that Trent is out, the other is that we don’t have a right back, so we tell Curtis what to do. We changed the formation a bit to make it as simple as possible because it’s his first time in this position and we don’t want him to be a defender and think like that. It performed exceptionally well.“Harvey came on and played really well, all the other players did really well and we scored a great 2-1 goal at the right time.
It certainly helped steer the game in the right direction. They had good moments before. I think Burnley are in a very strange situation where they are playing much better than causing everyone problems. It causes problems not only for us, but for everyone.
His scoring ability is extraordinary. They always approach the next game with a positive mindset. I was really surprised by that.“Then we got a third goal and we could have had more, so it was all good. Besides the good conditions at Trent, it was a very good game and a very good result.
I lost Ali this morning. good. Joey has the flu. You will see Ali. And Ryan was in a bit of a mood before the game. Then they said it’s fine, but you can’t play a player who feels something in the warm-up, so we have to recover quickly and hope we have a lot of players back for the next game. Because of we need them obviously.”
