Jurgen Klopp hits back at Liverpool's Europa League expectations
- Liverpool began Europa League campaign with 3-1 win at LASK on Thursday
- Reds had to come from behind to win in Austria
- Jurgen Klopp believes his side will not 'fly through' the Europa League as critics expect
By Sean Walsh
Jurgen Klopp has insisted that Liverpool will not be able to breeze their way to Europa League glory despite being favourites to win the competition.
The Reds kicked off their group stage campaign with a 3-1 win at Austrian side LASK on Thursday evening.
Liverpool went a goal down early on and were behind at the break, scoring three times in the second half in order to turn the game around and take the three points.
Klopp opted to start senior players such as club captain Virgil van Dijk, Luis Diaz and Darwin Nunez, though did also select younger members of the squad like Ben Doak and Stefan Bajcetic.
Speaking to Liverpool's club channels post-match, Klopp was asked about the encouragement he could take from the performances of his young players.
"Oh yeah. How I said, I know how the world is and I know that people expect us to fly through this competition. It will not happen. It will not happen in the group stage, it will not happen in the knockout stage," he said.
"We have to dig in, which we did. It was a massive learning curve tonight, the opponent suffered much less from the pitch than we did. We had to get used to it. So we can learn so much.
"If we would have used Ben Doak a little more often, given him the ball I think he would have got the ball more times on the touchline and passed the ball inside or whatever. Stefan found a way into the game after a difficult start, but we caused the problems obviously with the timing of our passes. Ryan [Gravenberch] played a super game in really difficult circumstances and was really decisive for us. Ibou [Konate] could get 80 minutes I think, Stefan could get minutes. So there were so many positives and I am really happy about that."
Discussing the game in general, Klopp commented: "So obviously LASK had in the first half one shot on target and it was after a set-piece. We had very good moments but I saw the boys didn't feel that, it was not that we could think about our good moments - and I thought maybe we should do that again. Confidence-wise, frustration grew. That makes no sense; it’s human but it makes no sense.
"We showed two football situations from the first half where we did pretty well. I'm pretty sure the boys would have thought there was nothing good from the first half, but that's not true; we had good moments and that's what we showed and besides that we could start getting back into the game again and we had a good chance to turn it around. And that's what we did. And I'm really happy because I knew it would be difficult, it was difficult. We won it, well deserved, that's it."
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