Premier League week 5
Liverpool continue their perfect start with the 5th win as many games played in the Premier League. Most importantly today they extended their lead over Manchester City to five points before traveling to Napoli to defend their Champions League crown.
Indeed the Reds took care of business today 3-1 over Newcastle United. They overcame an early 1-0 deficit to score three goals and grab the three points. They now have 15 points while Manchester City conceded 3 goals at Norwich and finally fell 3-2. This is a surprising defeat for City and already create a big gap of 5 points. The season is still early but last season both club won their last 10+ games showing how hard it is to make up any deficit no matter when it is.
Liverpool coach, Klopp, on the victory and moving forward to Napoli:
I started enjoying after 25 minutes around about when we arrived finally in the game. We needed that, we didn’t want to have that but it’s not unlikely that it can happen because it was really difficult. Newcastle did what they did, they do that really well and are always a threat for counter-attacks.
Second half, learning from the game and showing the boys a couple of pictures which helps always because you can then justify the situation right – where’s the space and things like this. Second half we scored only one goal, but we played really good football and I liked it a lot. There were a few moments I enjoyed, not a lot but a few and enough to be the deserved winner today.
The challenge after international breaks is always to find a common rhythm again. Before we had that obviously, but then the boys played for different countries in different ways. Then somebody gives us one-and-a-half days to work on that, that’s not too much and then you need to use the game actually to come in. Yes, we had to do that plenty of times and that’s why I’m not happy or whatever. We have to. The boys did and that’s good, but we needed longer. It was not 1-0 and now click, we are now here. We needed really longer and that’s OK. As long as we don’t concede, then there’s always a chance for us to come back in the game. Of course, it helps that we know that.
We cannot go to Napoli and say we play with 60, 70, 80 per cent of what we usually do. It’s a completely different game. We will not have the ball as often and as long as we had it today. They are, unfortunately, really good. I’m not sure if they played already or they will play now. We will watch them tomorrow and then we make decisions about how we can try to win against them. But that’s a proper opponent. They are really good and they caused us problems already and we now have to make sure the problems will not be that big this time.
