Gary Neville and Jurgen Klopp are enjoying a little bit of verbal combat at the moment…
The Sky Sports pundit recently annoyed Liverpool’s manager by suggesting we should not put all our effort into the Champions League so that we’d have a greater chance of lifting the Premier League next spring.
SEE MORE:
Tyler & Neville spoke nonsense about Trent Alexander-Arnold last night
But yesterday during Klopp’s press-conference [cited in the Times] Liverpool’s manager stated this was a simplistic mindset and claimed Neville’s opinion comes from a TV studio and not the training ground:
“Gary should come over and tell me how that would work,” he said. “How do you prepare for a game and not focus on it? You bring your kids in the Champions League? That would be funny! I don’t want to be too critical because I don’t know exactly how he said it but sitting in an office and talking about football is completely different to doing the job.”
Neville reacted on Twitter by suggesting he was actually only trying to compliment Liverpool in the first place.
https://twitter.com/GNev2/status/1040631495512260613?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1040631495512260613&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.liverpoolecho.co.uk%2Fsport%2Ffootball%2Ftransfer-news%2Fliverpool-news-transfers-live-jurgen-15149929
In fairness, he probably was, but Klopp’s point still stands. How can he prioritise one competition when we’re only in September?!
What was the point in working so hard to qualify for the Champions League to just fall out at the Group Stages?
And anyway, Liverpool have the kind of strength in depth now to perform highly in multiple competitions.
On the bench today, we’ll likely have Xherdan Shaqiri, Joel Matip, Daniel Sturridge and Fabinho…