Jurgen Klopp reacted furiously to a question from the press in the aftermath of Liverpool’s 3-0 thrashing by Wolves on Saturday.
The Reds fell behind early on after Joel Matip put the ball into his own net before Craig Dawson added a second with just 12 minutes on the clock. Ruben Neves later rounded off the scoring as Liverpool sunk to 10th place in the Premier League standings.
Klopp was understandably in no mood to speak at length about another humbling – they have been heavily defeated in trips to Brentford, Brighton and now Wolves already in 2023 – and he took his frustration out on a journalist who had supposedly written about the team in a negative light.
The reporter asked: “That has been a theme throughout the season, starting so slowly. I know you said you can’t explain it but do you think it is a mentality thing? Does it make you look at how you prepare for games, the fact you start the game so slowly after a whole week on the training pitch?”
Klopp quickly sighed before replying: “It’s very difficult to talk to you. If I’m 100% honest, I’d prefer not to do that. You know why. For all the things you wrote. So if somebody else wants to ask that question then I will answer it.”
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Another journalist proceeded to field the same question to Klopp, to which he properly replied: “It’s true [Liverpool start slowly], we had that subject through the first part of the season. Now, not so much anymore, but today it was the pinnacle of our problems because in a game like this it’s absolutely not allowed.
“You can criticise, you can judge, you can say whatever you want and you are probably right, I have nothing to say against it. These [opening] 12 minutes are not allowed. Coming here with all the things we did in the last few days, and during the whole season so far, what we want and you arrive here and this is is the outcome, that’s really hard to take, I have to say.
“So I don’t think we had other games where we conceded early goals, we had that since last season, it is not that much anymore but we didn’t win games, so it’s pretty likely that when you lose games you concede the first one.
“But again, these 12 minutes were the worst for a while.”
