In a season that’s seen us almost continually improve our performances with each half of football we play, Saturday was a bit of an anomaly.
The first half against Swansea was one of the worst halves we have played all season and was right up there with the first half against Burnley.
They walked through our defence far too easily, we were not fluid enough going forward, and the midfield looked short of energy. We could not have complained if we had been 3-0 down by the break.
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Klopp has now explained exactly where he thinks we went wrong:
“We were not ready for this game. Obviously, it’s my responsibility that we are ready for games, today I saw we weren’t. [Our] body language was not good, the build-up was absolutely too static. Swansea did well, so that’s maybe the most important thing to say first, but we were really too static,” he said (official site)
“It’s not allowed that it’s that easy to disturb our build-up. It was a little bit difficult and we tried to [replicate] it in training, we knew what they were going to do. It was pretty clear it would be similar to what they did against City so we knew where the spaces were but obviously it was a kind of misunderstanding.
“We didn’t do well. We were never compact enough for counter-pressing situations, which makes absolutely no sense, we lost a lot of balls. That’s not a big problem, it’s part of football, but we were not really in the [right] situation – that was the start of the game.”
The win over Swansea has proved to be vital in the context of the weekend’s other results. Spurs beat Man City 2-0 to move us to within two points of the league leaders, and Stoke drew 1-1 with Man Utd to put a three-point cushion between us and them before they come to Anfield in two weeks.