Jürgen Klopp has revealed why his Liverpool side fell to a 1-0 defeat in Naples on Wednesday.
The Reds failed to impress in their second game of the Champions League group stage, which had got off to an encouraging start with a 3-2 victory against PSG at Anfield.
Of the match against Napoli, Klopp said (quoted by Teamtalk):
The day was completely different, we couldn’t train in the morning because Napoli did not give us a pitch,
We are used to that though, we like that, so we talked about a few things without training on the pitch. We had a chance to talk about tactical things. That was different.
We were in the hotel for the whole day. We couldn’t go for a walk in Naples as the police told us not to walk in front of the hotel.
It’s not an excuse, it’s just that it was different. Then the performance was like it was.
Turning to tactics, Klopp then examined what went wrong on the night itself:
The start was completely normal. It was an open game.
But in the last 15 minutes we gave it away because we lost the ball in the wrong situation and because we did not cover the space we had to cover. That’s the story of the game and nobody will remember that in 10 years.
I don’t make too big a fuss of it. It was very intense, in the detail different but in general similar (Napoli and Chelsea).
The boys were always there, even against Chelsea in the cup, but this was not a good game. We lost the game a little and we never came back.
We had the worst defending moment in the 89th minute and they used it. I saw a lot of worse games in my life where we get a point but it was a fair result.
Few Liverpool fans could dispute Klopp’s comments after such an abject performance.
