Jurgen Klopp: ‘Liverpool are over Tottenham Hotspur game, we are not children’

Following Liverpool’s win against Union SG in the Europa League, manager Jurgen Klopp declared that his team was “over” their sad Premier League loss to Tottenham Hotspur.

Following a few days of unparalleled VAR drama, in which a perfectly good goal for Luis Diaz at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium was overturned for offside, the Reds welcomed their Belgian opponents to Anfield.

The PGMOL acknowledged a serious human error before publishing the audio tape of that match, which also resulted in red cards for Curtis Jones and Diogo Jota. Additionally, Klopp stated that a replay would be the best result.

The Merseyside giants, on the other hand, had the ideal response to their midweek nightmare in North London, remaining undefeated in the Europa League due to a 2-0 victory against Union SG.

Ryan Gravenberch and Jota both scored at Anfield as Jurgen Klopp’s team made it six points from two games in Group E, despite the less-than-convincing results. Jota will be suspended for Sunday’s game against Brighton & Hove Albion.

After Gravenberch capitalised on a mistake from goalkeeper Anthony Moris to break the deadlock on the stroke of half time, Liverpool were under the cosh for periods of the second half and struggled to put the game to bed, but with two minutes of added time gone, Jota fired home into the far corner to make sure of the result.

When asked about Jota’s positive response to a challenging time domestically – with it now being ruled by a Premier League panel that he should not have been dismissed at Tottenham – Klopp quickly insisted that all of his team, including last-minute own-goal victim Joel Matip, have consigned last weekend’s events to history.

“Very good. How should he deal with it? I knew that it would be difficult when yesterday I spoke about the other game,” Klopp responded when asked about Jota’s performance and mental attitude.

“I knew and you proved to me again just how the world is. I think everybody who was here heard what I said but everybody understood something else; it’s OK. But if I made the impression yesterday that I was still in the game against Tottenham, I was not at all. That’s long ago. We are over that.

“That’s fine and Diogo is that as well and Joel could’ve played tonight because he’s over it as well. That’s all fine. We are not children or whatever. We just had a few questions to answer and did that and that’s it.

“From a focus point of view, it was not a problem to focus on the game. I would say in the game it was a problem to keep being focused because that’s how it looked a little bit.

“We got a bit sluggish and stuff like this. I didn’t like that too much but that’s obviously neither with Diogo nor with the team anything to do with the last game or the last week. It’s just because that’s the challenge of football anyway.”

With Jones now serving a three-match domestic ban alongside Jota, the door could swing open for Gravenberch to make a name for himself in the Premier League, and Klopp confirmed that the Dutchman was taken off before the end in order to avoid risking any physical glitches.

“We thought he might be able to play 90, we want to give him 90, but then we saw now he dropped a little bit and didn’t want to go there [with] any risks so that’s why we brought on Dom [Dominik Szoboszlai] for a few minutes. [It’s] good. Everything goes in the right direction, that’s really helpful,” Klopp added.

“He’s enjoying the situation, enjoying himself, that’s very important, [he] gets step by step all the confidence back, that’s really cool to see.

He’s in the middle of the group, fits really well to the age group of the majority of the squad, so that’s really good. That’s only positive.”

Liverpool hold a two-point lead over Toulouse at the top of Europa League Group E and return to Premier League action away to Brighton & Hove Albion on Sunday.