Many Liverpool fans have thought about little other than the Champions League final for the last couple of weeks, waiting to find out if they have tickets in the ballot and paying eye-watering prices for day trips to Kiev, but Jürgen Klopp has put it all to the back of his mind.
Thanks to the defeat at Chelsea last week Liverpool still need a point to guarantee Champions League football next season and Klopp has not been instructing his players to keep their focus on Brighton on Sunday afternoon without being willing to do so himself. “It would have been nice to do it earlier but now we have to do it on the last day,” the Liverpool manager said.
“We have had a good season but now we have to deliver it all again. I have no problem concentrating on Brighton, I have not been skipping forward to think about Real Madrid.
“I do not have a lot of skills but one discipline I learned early on was to concentrate fully on the next step, because in football if you don’t you can fall flat on your face. Brighton are a good team, in a position to play without pressure. We need to be careful.”
Though Liverpool undoubtedly have had a good season, beating Manchester City on three occasions and reaching the Champions League final, even a win in their final game would take them to only 75 points, one fewer than they collected last season.
“It’s difficult to compare one season directly with another,” Klopp said by way of explanation. “Last season we were not in Europe, for example. We would have picked up more Premier League points this season had we not been involved in the later stages of the Champions League.
“For sure it feels to me like we have improved from last season, even if we had a few results that weren’t as good as they could have been. We have had many more good games than we played last season, some of them outstandingly good performances.
“I would say 76 is obviously a bigger number than 75, but they are both big numbers. If 73 is good enough to get us into the Champions League that is a big number as well. Maybe we have not had the most successful season in the history of football, but it has been quite successful. I am fine with it so far, but of course we have to make the last two steps.”
