Liverpool were supposed to beat Fulham at home on Sunday and revive their Premier League season. But instead, Klopp’s side have been beaten 1-0 by the travelling side.
Lemina scored the only goal of the game in the 45th minute and then Fulham went onto hold on to that slender lead for the second half. The Anfield outfit managed to have only three shots on target throughout the whole game and according to pundit Jamie Carragher, Liverpool’s mental fragility is the biggest reason why they can’t seem to find the back of the net.
Carragher told Sky Sports, TEAMtalk: “So often at these stages last season, Liverpool scored late goals; even the year before when they were chasing down Man City.
“That man [Klopp] rightly called his side the ‘mentality monsters’ and they deserved that tag. But right now, they are like ‘mentality midgets’.
“Every time there is a bit of adversity, you go behind in a game, his team is just not dealing well with adversity at any stage in this last three or four months.
“It’s not acceptable from Liverpool, that sort of performance, and I’ll tell you what, I played in some really poor Liverpool teams.
“These defeats, at home, against the level of opposition, you need to find something from somewhere. It looks like top four positions now are a long way off.”
Liverpool were scoring at will last season and also for the first half of this season. But since the new year, the Anfield outfit just cannot find the back of the net, especially at home.
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In recent weeks, they have failed to score against teams like Brighton, Everton, Chelsea and now Fulham, which is a real cause of concern for all the Liverpool fans out there.
Jurgen Klopp though is not is ready to accept this argument and he’s made it clear that Liverpool have a few issues to sort out but a broken mentality is not one of them.
The manager said, as per the club’s official website: “Believe me, these boys want [it] but it doesn’t work in the moment and there are some reasons for it: we don’t score goals and we concede at least one, which in the moment looks like it is enough against us. You can discuss whatever you want, obviously, I cannot just answer and say, ‘Yeah, we don’t have mentality.’ We have mentality, it’s just not the mentality we are used to probably, but the boys want to win games.
“They wanted to win this game today. I saw that. We made mistakes still, that’s the problem, but that’s not about you don’t want it – the boys don’t want to make mistakes, we just made them.
“We have to make sure the mistakes we make are not accountable anymore, so like you can concede a goal – we conceded goals in our best phases, the best periods of our lives, but the only thing is then you are not bothered about it. That’s where we have to come. We have really tight results in the moment, pretty much always against us, and we have to make sure we win football games again. If it’s a 1-0, it’s fine, fight for it with all you have and then you can gain confidence and momentum maybe again. In the moment we don’t have that.”
