Jurgen Klopp was full of praise for Fabinho when he was asked about his value to the Liverpool squad and whether he is underappreciated by others.
Turning to the loss of the Brazilian last season as he had to cover the centre-back crisis we were enduring within the club, the manager wasn’t too bothered on outside opinion of the defensive midfielder.
The question of whether our No.3’s importance was overlooked by others was posed to the German and he was quick to defend the importance of our man.
The 54-year-old said: “Not by us! I don’t know what you saw and ‘overlooked’ or whatever.
“I think it was Jamie Redknapp who said last night ‘for Trent it was really difficult last season because Virgil wasn’t there’, and Joe and Joel just to say.
“I don’t know why we have to mention that all the time, how short is the memory, it’s not for us.
“We had to play Hendo and Fabinho as centre-halves and that is of course not exactly like it should be.
“I thought they did really well and we played really good games with them there but it obviously costs you stability and you cannot win football games in the mid-to-long term without stability, it’s not possible.
“You can win a football game, you can win each football game because the other team hits 20 times the post and the crossbar and you can win it but that has nothing to do with yourself, it’s just because they are unlucky.
“But if you want to win it because you are the better team you need stability and we had no stability, we couldn’t have, that’s the situation.
“How good Fabinho is you saw last night. But he is not a machine because it’s not like he played all the other games like the last two and against Chelsea all on the same level.
“We are all human beings but the quality he has is absolutely incredible. If he is at his best and he is in the centre of the pitch, yes that’s then very, very helpful because then you can think about a lot of other things.
“You can organise your protection completely different because you can rely on different things. If you don’t have that you organise your protection differently but it’s completely out of the box because usually we do it like this and everything has to change because he is not there.
“That needs time, but you don’t have [time] in the Premier League. That was our problem last year but no, we didn’t overlook it. If you overlooked it, I don’t know”.
There was a lot of focus on the loss of the former Monaco man last season, due his rotation within the team during an injury crisis and his own injuries, but it’s clear the boss is a big fan of the big man.
The 28-year-old is a key part of our game and he’s certainly one of the players that once they’re not in the team, their loss is felt a lot more.
You can watch Klopp’s comments on Fabinho via our Twitter account @empireofthekop:
🗣️ "The quality he has is absolutely incredible. If he is at his best and he is in the centre of that pitch, yes that’s then very, very helpful because then you can think about a lot of other things".
Klopp of people overlooking Fabinho's role for #LFC 🇧🇷 pic.twitter.com/UZEkl1hC1t
— Empire of the Kop (@empireofthekop) January 22, 2022