Liverpool under Jurgen Klopp are currently two points and seven points away from a UEFA Europa League position, respectively. They will play a critical match at Anfield against Tottenham, and if they win, they will move up to fifth place.
After 13 years, Liverpool may not qualify for the Champions League, but Klopp is still happy to participate in the Europa League. “That’s how it is; we accept what we can get. Although we didn’t go into the season thinking that winning the Europa League would be fantastic, the season did teach us a few things. And that’s perfectly acceptable. It’s fine if it’s the Europa League; if so, then so be it. I don’t find what we qualify for to be all that fascinating.”
“I want to create a basis that we qualify for the best possible scenario pretty much, so squeeze everything out. I want to play the best possible football – if we get nothing for that at the end of the season then we created that situation earlier in this year,” Jurgen Klopp said in the pre-match conference as quoted by Liverpool. Klopp also went on to explain his team selection for Liverpool’s recent games. He emphasized on the fact that fitness and ‘readiness’ play a key part in his decision-making for the team.
“So, a couple of things. We didn’t change not because we won the game before, we didn’t change because we set the team obviously slightly differently up and want to give the boys the chance to find some rhythm in that, to get used to it, to get used to different things. That’s reason one.”
“Number two is I said the ticket into this team will always be the readiness, or from now on again the readiness, to defend and to counter-press and I liked a lot of that what I saw, and if you say that you have to give the credit for it as well, so you can buy the ticket again if you want,” Klopp added.