Klopp: ‘We are ready’

Agency Reporter

Liverpool’s Premier League season resumes against Everton this weekend following an enforced three-and-a-half month break due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Victory would represent another significant step towards the title for the Reds, and Klopp believes his team are “ready to go” ahead of a period in which they are scheduled to play nine matches in five weeks.

Jürgen, can you sense the feeling of excitement among the players ahead of Sunday’s restart?

Yes, you can feel it. I feel the intensity everywhere, pretty much. From the first whistle yesterday [Wednesday] it started, so it was really good to see that we are back, that the players can go again, that some of the issues are still there. There was a lot of excitement yesterday around the games; it was pretty much all involved, I would say, with strange decisions, bad injuries, everything was involved. We are ready to go, but we have to be ready to face problems because there will be problems. It is like it always was, it’s not new. In a football game, you have a plan for it and in the game you have to force it through, or you have to adapt to another one or whatever. It will be exciting.

Everton took one point from their last three matches before the break – can you take that form into consideration in your preparations?

No. Look, when you analyse Everton now you have to look as well to Napoli or any other team because Carlo Ancelotti has a specific way he wants his team to play and he is long enough there now to push that through. So, it will be a football-playing side, they will play as much football as we let them. We have to find challenges, win challenges, use gaps, find gaps and all that stuff. We have to play through, we have to be 100 per cent disciplined, we have to be full of joy, we have to stay greedy before the game, in the game [and] after the game. That’s all what we need.

The pictures we will show the boys will be from Everton before the break obviously, but we don’t know exactly – it’s for them like for us, we don’t change now in four weeks what was good before. We just want to play on the highest level and I think we started training all together at a similar time to Everton, so they had exactly the same time, like us, to prepare.

We had to do a lot of physical stuff to make the boys ready, we had to do tactical stuff, but it’s not that we are all now finished in our preparation because nine weeks, or 10 or 11 weeks, is really longer than we ever had in a summer, so you lose some things. Not a lot, but you lose them and you have to remember and we do that on the pitch. So there are some things to do until Sunday, in the next three sessions, but how I said, I’m excited and we will try to give our best.