Klopp: I said three words to players after defeat

Matt Stead

Jurgen Klopp said he told his Liverpool players only “three words” after they lost to West Ham. Let’s play the guessing game…

Liverpool limped to a sixth league defeat of the season at Upton Park, with headers from Michail Antonio and Andy Carroll easing the Hammers to a 2-0 victory.

Klopp admitted after the game that he was “really angry“, and the German now says he spoke only three words to his players in the dressing room post-match. How many of them would require asterisks?

“I only told the players three words after the game,” said Klopp. “But we [will] have to speak about it again, because it was not the worst game I ever saw in my life. The problem was that I saw what we could have reached, yet we got nothing.

“You can talk about good crosses or West Ham hitting the post, or bad defending by ourselves.

“But for the rest of the game we had the ball, we passed it, we were around the box and we didn’t shoot or pass in the right moment, we did not have consistency in our crosses and things like this. We could have won today, and we lost 2-0. That’s really not good.”

Klopp was then asked on Liverpool’s slow starts this season, after the Hammers joined Watford, Chelsea and Southampton in scoring in the opening 10 minutes against the Reds.

Asked whether this was a worrying statistic, Klopp said: “Yes of course. We have spoken three times more about this, and it is not good.

“We had the situation where we kicked off, and West Ham played the first ball very easy into Andy Carroll, as you would expect.

“Then we are under pressure, and we are trying to pass balls on the half-volley, on the chest and in the air, and you think ‘what are they doing?!’

“You cannot control balls like this, but that’s how it was. I’m not lucky with this!”