Liverpool were beaten 4-1 at home in the Premier League by Manchester City this weekend and with this loss, the Reds’ title defence, more or less, has come to an end.
Liverpool and Man City started the match as equals but it was in the second half that City shifted gears and Klopp’s men were unable to keep up.
The Anfield outfit did manage to level the game at 1-1 but then some uncanny mistakes from Alisson Becker helped Guardiola’s men run away with the match.
Speaking after the match, the Liverpool boss did not fail to point out their mistakes but, at the same time, the German seemed to be happy with how his team performed otherwise.
He said, as per Liverpoolfc.com: “Look, big parts of the game were really, really good.
“I think tonight there played two teams against each other: one with a crazy good run, won now their 14th game in a row, and another team with obviously different results – better and lesser good results.
“And then nobody saw that in the first half, you only saw two really good football teams who tried to cause each other problems. I think we were, for a lot of people probably, surprisingly dominant in the first half, [we] played really good stuff. 0-0 at half-time, keep on going, expect little changes because I always do that, adapt to them as quick as possible.
“Find the right spaces to play football again because that’s the main thing, we played really confident football.
“And then second half we started, they changed system to 4-4-2, at least defensively so they changed the high press and we had these few minutes where we try to find the solution in the last line, obviously, to find a free player in midfield.
“The movement was not exactly like it should have been then. Then they scored their first goal, we scored the equaliser and then we made two massive mistakes, that’s how it is. They used that and pretty much game over.
“In a game when you have such a good moment in the game, these two goals were obviously the killer of the game. Everybody knows that and we don’t have to speak around that.
“That’s the truth. And then Phil Foden with a brilliant individual effort scores the fourth one and that’s why the result is as it is. So, the result is actually the absolute opposite of what we want and the performance is what we wanted in the majority of the game, but in the end we lost anyway.”
The loss means Liverpool are now 10 points behind league leaders Manchester City and the Citizens still have a game in hand. And to make matters worse, the Anfield outfit will take on Leicester City in the Premier League next weekend – a game where they can once again drop points.
If Klopp’s men fail to pick up a win next Saturday then we are surely going to see a new league champion at the end of this season.
