The Reds go into Sunday’s match at Crystal Palace having conceded just once in four outings since Naby Keita, Sadio Mane and Mohamed Salah departed for the Africa Cup of Nations.
During the third part of Friday’s press conference, Klopp was asked about the importance of this and more.
Read a full transcript below…
On Liverpool recording three successive shutouts and finding improved solidity at a time when Keita, Mane and Salah are absent…
It’s essential, the only way you can do it. When you lose key players for injuries or tournaments or whatever, the solution is not that you will be flying in the next game and you say, ‘OK, now we score five or six’ and you create chances like hell and all these kind of things. Wherever they are on the pitch, whether they are strikers, midfielders or wherever, [when] you lose key players you have to adapt. In our case it was 100 per cent clear that we have to be solid, rock solid. It’s a clear agreement, maybe you don’t see it all the time, but ‘defending first’: we have to be organised, that is the basis for everything we do and in this moment I can see outstanding commitment to our defending, that’s how it is.
