Jürgen Klopp touched on a range of topics when previewing the first leg of Liverpool’s Champions League quarter-final tie with Real Madrid.
The two clubs will meet each other on Tuesday night at Estadio Alfredo Di Stefano for the first time since the 2018 final, where Zinedine Zidane’s team claimed a 3-1 victory.
Speaking to reporters from the Spanish capital on Monday evening, Klopp stressed plenty has changed since that Kiev encounter and went on to detail the Reds’ motivation to finish the 2020-21 season on a high note.
On whether he saw the game at Arsenal at the weekend as a ‘test of character’ for Trent Alexander-Arnold…
It was clear that people would say things like this and how it works that we have to give somebody a proper knock and then he shows a reaction. I don’t understand life like this, I don’t understand education like this. For me, it’s different. You can do it obviously by showing trust and faith in somebody and then he can succeed. Or you can leave him out and then he shows a reaction. Whatever you want. For us it was not a character test or whatever. What we did was not two weeks working on how we can show Gareth Southgate that he was not right with his decision. What we wanted to do was for Trent to play his best football – what he did quite a few times for us in the past. That was all. We didn’t see it as a test, we just thought it was an important game so let’s prepare for it.
