Jurgen Klopp has explained why Liverpool will kick off their pre-season campaign with back-to-back 30-minute matches.
The Reds arrived at their Salzburg base last Monday and immediately got down to work as preparation started for the new season.
And, after over a week of training sessions, Liverpool will commence their friendly programme with two 30-minute games against FC Wacker Innsbruck and VfB Stuttgart tonight.
The Reds’ squad will then remain in Austria for two more games against FSV Mainz 05 and Hertha Berlin before the month is out.
But Klopp has moved to explain why his side will kick off their pre-season schedule with the unusual double-header.
“I’m so happy we could do that, really,” he told Liverpoolfc.com. “We usually don’t find opponents for that because they say, ‘What would we want with 30 minutes?’
“But we had a seven-week break; so, not all, pretty much four or five people, but we had a long break, the longest for a long, long time.
“So we decided not to play too early. We wanted to give ourselves time to get in, to judge the intensity of training constantly, say, ‘That’s OK, here we want to do more, here we do less.’ We can do that between two sessions, we can do that between two days. That’s what we do.
“And then you have the first game and after that long time 45 minutes is a tough one. You see that in all pre-seasons when you make 11 changes at half-time and the guys who leave the pitch after 45 minutes are not sitting in the dressing room saying, ‘Why did I come off?!’ They are really happy.
“I prefer this time that we go just for 30 minutes with really all we have, absolutely pretty much no break. Like you might hear us shouting sometimes in training where we then make these little breaks only but the rest is really just: go, go, go. That’s what I would like to see and see where it leads us to.
“It will not be the most organised, all this kind of stuff – how always. What we need to get back immediately is the impulse for the things we want to do and you can do that in games like this. It could be a bit chaotic or could be a bit wild – no problem with that.
“But this is the start for us playing-wise and I’m really pleased we find two opponents who say, ‘Yeah, the 30-minute idea is a really good idea.’”
While Klopp also confirmed that he is likely to use two entirely different XIs for the two games, saying: “Yeah, absolutely. It’s a session where it’s 30 minutes – it’s 30 minutes, that’s a lot but it’s only 30 minutes.
“That means we don’t have to react the next day with recovery or stuff like this; we just put in two sessions the next day and can carry on. But play the game anyway, 11 v 11 against two opponents, with changes and all these kinds of things. That’s the cool stuff about it.
“Usually the games are so important in pre-season but they interrupt the rhythm for training. This game doesn’t do that – that’s cool.”
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