Much like after the loss at Paris Saint-Germain last week, Liverpool Manager Jurgen Klopp has hit out at the tactics of his opponent. The Reds battled back came back from a 1-0 deficit to win at Burnley 3-1 and stay within two points of Premier League table toppers Manchester City.
However, the win came with a price as defender Joe Gomez was injured so badly that he needed to be stretchered off. More details will be known after the results of Gomez’s scans are made public, but it looks like he’ll be out for awhile. After the match, Klopp had a lot of issues with Burnley’s sliding tackles.
While acknowledging that these tactics are within the rules of the game, Klopp had a lot of gripes about it.
“I’m pretty sure I don’t make a lot of friends, but that’s not my job. I said after the first challenge, I don’t know who did it, sliding tackle from six, seven yards, getting the ball, everybody likes it,” the German said at his post match news conference.
“I said to the ref: ‘It’s no foul, but please tell them you cannot do that.’ Nobody can judge that. You get the ball, nice, but it’s like bowling because you get the player as well. It happened four or five times, everybody likes it, but Joe is injured, and probably not only a little bit. We don’t know in the moment, we sent him home so we have to see, but it’s his ankle, yes.”
“They wanted to be aggressive. Aggression is a part of football. You try something, and you need someone to say: ‘Be careful.’ There were a lot of situations, challenges.”
“There was nothing to say: ‘Wow, too much.’ They were normal challenges. But with six or seven yards and then [slide], these times are over. They are over.”
Jurgen Klopp wasn’t done.
“We all want to win football games, and there are different ways of doing it. Somebody has to tell you to stop doing it, make two more steps and make a normal challenge,” he continued.
“Don’t go five yards before the player because the grass is wet and take any risk. It’s not intentional, but these are the situations.”
Klopp’s men will next head to Bournemouth on Saturday before a massive UEFA Champions League clash with Napoli on Tuesday at Anfield. The Reds knockout round fate is on the line in that match.
The win over Burnley gave 2018-19 Liverpool the best start to a season (39 points from a possible 45 after matches) that they have ever had at a top tier of English football. It’s the best of their 126 year club history.
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net, which is partnered with News Now. Banks, a former writer for NBC Chicago.com and Chicago Tribune.com, regularly appears as a guest pundit on WGN CLTV and co-hosts the “Let’s Get Weird, Sports” podcast on SB Nation.
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