Jurgen Klopp dismissed Liverpool's failure to set a new record for consecutive Premier League wins as a minor subplot of their shock 3-0 defeat to Watford.
The Reds could have held the record outright - rather than share it with Manchester City - had they picked up a 19th straight success at Vicarage Road on Saturday afternoon.
However, an Ismaila Sarr brace and a goal from Troy Deeney put paid to that, and ended the visitors' 44-game unbeaten league run in the process.
Asked about the missed opportunity to create history full-time, Klopp replied: "Not really, because I don’t think you can break records because you want to break records.
"You break records because you are 100 per cent focused on each step you have to do, whatever record it is – a marathon or whatever – and for that you have to perform.
"The boys performed and that’s why we won the games, but tonight we were not good enough and that’s not now a plus for me that I think in history, when they look back in 500 years and will say ‘Liverpool nearly did it’.
"That’s not my main concern, you cannot change that and it was always clear, sometime we would lose a game. We didn’t wait for it, but it was clear it would happen – we didn’t think about it, but we knew it would happen and tonight it happened.
"Now I see it rather positive because the closer you come to these records… I am not bothered, but I am not sure how other people think about it, so now on we can play free football again, we don’t have to defend or try to get a record, we can just try to win football games again and that is what we will do."
Klopp was later asked if he might be reluctant to criticise his players after a historic run of form came to an end at the hands of Nigel Pearson's men.
But the German revealed that Liverpool's standards have only remained so high because of his willingness to point out flaws win, lose, or draw.
He continued: "We criticise them all the time, we criticised them after the United game, the Leicester game, the Man City game – criticism is not somebody telling you are too silly to play football, criticism is telling somebody what went wrong.
"That’s what we do constantly and we will not change that now because of that. I know maybe a little bit which direction your question goes, but how I said: we win a game and after the game the boys immediately get a five-minute summary of what I have seen already or what is still in my mind about the game.
"Everybody can then leave the dressing room straight because I am not shouting at them, I didn’t do it today, I didn’t do it after other games, but criticism can happen all the time. We never stopped being critical with ourselves."
