Jürgen Klopp said Liverpool’s refusal to lose confidence was rewarded as it took a significant step towards the Champions League quarter-finals with a 2-0 win over RB Leipzig. Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mané took advantage of the defensive mistakes of last season’s semifinalists to give Liverpool a first-hand advantage in the rearranged clash in Budapest.
The victory ended a series of three consecutive defeats for the Premier League champions, and Klopp praised his players’ mentality for maintaining faith in his style despite the recent recession.
The Liverpool manager said: “We are no longer children. We don’t think it’s a victory and everything is fine. It was more important to me again, and I mean, we played good football. We’ve done that a lot in the past few weeks, but no one is really happy with the results.
“Of course, but the football we played – dominating (Manchester) City in a way that doesn’t happen very often, the same with Leicester, we shouldn’t forget – but tonight the result was with us. We kept a clean score, we scored two goals, we forced the opponent to make the mistakes we made a lot in the last few weeks, we worked hard, great individual performances, but mainly how we work to put it all together.
“If you watch Leipzig more often, you’ll know that their game can be completely different from today. They cause problems for you. We saw the lineup and we had no idea which system they were going to play on. They can play six systems. They had chances, of course, this is normal, but we had good control over most of the game and this is very important. But that doesn’t happen much against Leipzig. “
Klopp was delighted with the return to good form of goalkeeper Alisson, who made a beautiful save from Christopher Nkunku early in the second half with the goalless game. “He also had great moments in the Leicester game, made excellent saves in that game, but of course it will help,” he said. “A clean sheet and Ali will sleep very well on the plane on the way home. Ali helped us a lot. “
Klopp also said it was a performance that many outside the club could have suspected of being beyond the champions in their current form: “I think people expected us to slip out tonight. I’m sure people thought ‘This is going to be really complicated for Liverpool’. It was difficult, but we did it. I don’t believe in motivating that much, yes, we can use that from time to time, but we don’t have enough contact with the outside world to really know how much people want us to fail.
“But of course – Liverpool face Leipzig; the chances we had of winning the game fell by the minute to people’s perception. That is good. I probably would have said the same thing if I hadn’t been so close to the team. But the boys reacted very well and I am very happy with that. “