Klopp on pre-season game – Fabregas has apologised for tackle

Jurgen Klopp has been giving his post-match verdict on the pre-season friendly against Chelsea.

The game saw Cesc Fabregas sent off for a tackle on Ragnar Klavan towards the end of the fixture that Liverpool lost 1-0.

Klopp said of the incident:

It’s a red card. He came by us in the dressing room and said sorry. He came too late in the challenge, of course. Sometimes in life if you are too late you get a red card, especially in football. That’s how it was.

Despite being a 'friendly' there were a host of yellow cards - with Alberto Moreno going in to the book after just 6 minutes.

The ref thought from the beginning he should show early yellow cards. I don’t think it was too hard. It was far away from a friendly game and that’s OK, that’s why we are here.

Chelsea now have a new manager in the dugout, Antonio Conte, and already he has brought his defensive methods to the Stamford Bridge club.  Klopp said,

About the game, when a team with the quality of Chelsea defends so deep then every team in the world will have a little problem. And we had the problem that 80 per cent of our passing game was absolutely OK, 20 per cent not. And this 20 per cent, most of the time, was the last pass.

The last pass is a very important pass. So we had a long way to go back to defend and not create real chances. We had to run a lot to avoid this. We had to play football and we had more ball possession against a really good side. We could have scored, we didn’t – 1-0, that’s what we have to accept.

Two players Jurgen thought could have done more were Mane and Firmino:

Sadio Mane is a wonderful player, that’s clear, but he can play much better than he did. He was good today in a lot of situations. As I said, I saw a lot of these things – individual quality.  Roberto Firmino until now has played a fantastic pre-season, but today it was not the most wonderful day for him, but he is a great player too.

Despite being a friendly the result still rankled with the Liverpool boss:

We wanted to get the draw, we wanted to win, we were in the game until the last second – that was all good. But we lost and we should not ignore that completely, even when it’s not a Premier League game. I would rather lose today than in the Premier League, of course, but we were only here to win the game. We are little bit disappointed about the result, but from the performance I can take a lot of good things.

Next up for Liverpool is AC Milan.

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Klopp on pre-season game – Fabregas has apologised for tackle

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