Jürgen Klopp has said Liverpool’s January slump is a result of poor decision-making and not fatigue from his high-intensity playing style. Liverpool have won once in seven games and the optimism that surrounded their impressive first half of the season has diminished after consecutive home defeats in the Premier League and EFL Cup.
Wednesday’s Cup semi-final loss to Southampton prompted renewed criticism of Klopp from Raymond Verheijen, the former Wales coach and fitness consultant who rarely misses an opportunity to question the Liverpool manager’s training regime.
Verheijen claimed Klopp had “run his players into the ground during pre-season. Consequently, players cannot perform during an entire season.” He added: “Fantastic coach. Great in developing a playing style. But does not have a clue about the principles of periodisation.”
The Liverpool manager, however, insists the club’s data shows no evidence of energy levels or distance covered falling in recent matches, only a reduction in the number of sprints against opponents who are defending deep against his team.
“The figures are still as high in all parts as they were before, especially in distance,” he said. “The games are different so there are sometimes fewer sprints to do. You can sprint, but where do you want to sprint? In this direction might make no sense. That changes in a few games. It’s completely different when you play Manchester United, Manchester City or Swansea City. There’s a big difference. So no, they didn’t change. It’s not a fitness problem until now.”
Swansea and Southampton adopted similar tactics at Anfield, defending in numbers and punishing Liverpool on the counterattack, and Klopp believes poor judgment was mainly responsible for defeats that have left his team 10 points behind Chelsea in the Premier League and out of the EFL Cup. He expects a similar approach from Wolverhampton Wanderers in Saturday’s FA Cup fourth-round tie at Anfield and said: “We will be dominant again and we need to find the spaces between their players.”
The Liverpool manager expanded: “We didn’t play that well but we could have won games. We could have won at United, we could have beaten Swansea. It’s not about the things you can measure. Football is about decision-making. You have to make the right decision at the right moment, and obviously we didn’t do that often enough. We don’t look for excuses. We don’t say it’s about judgement that we don’t win any more, or something like this, we are 100% sure it’s our responsibility. But decision making has changed.
“We don’t run less, we don’t rest less. In one or two games we created less and that comes back to decision-making, playing the right pass because we didn’t see him, but it’s still a process. It was still a process when we had a few good games and we thought that we were flying from now on. Unfortunately, the season is too long for that. When you stop flying it’s hard work to get back into this mood. Other teams will have this situation and we hope we will have already sorted it. It’s not a bigger thing. It was not good enough in a few moments in the last few games and that changed the results completely.”
Klopp insisted his view of the FA Cup has not altered as a result of recent defeats, but the significance of Wolves’ visit has changed after the Swansea and Southampton losses. The Liverpool manager, who is expected to field a stronger side than that held at home in the third round by Plymouth Argyle, said: “It’s the next game, we lost the last two, so that changes a little bit the view of the third game. It hasn’t changed our view of the FA Cup in general. We knew about the importance of this tournament even when a few people thought we didn’t know about it because of the lineup in the third round.”
The Wolves manager, Paul Lambert, has vowed to attack Liverpool as he tries to inflict an FA Cup shock on his old study mate, Klopp. The pair have known each other since meeting on a coaching course in Germany in 2004. “I don’t see the point of sitting back when I’ve got creative players,” he said.
