On whether he was ‘disappointed’ Liverpool did not control the second half more…
No, not at all. Not at all, because that is what their playing style brought. You cannot control a game of football if every single ball is thrown into your 18-yard box, every throw-in is a long throw-in, every free-kick they get is a long ball. And they can do both – that’s why this is such a good team. They can play out from the back if they want to, they can be intense in their pressing, they have so many quality players. But they also have the quality to play a game like this with so many big players.
Of course it helps a little bit to have an extra man in a set-piece but if the goalkeeper takes the ball, there is no use in having an extra player anymore. So with set-pieces, it helps a little bit to have one extra player but not as much as you would like. It was impossible for us to control the game. When we had the ball, we kept it quite long and I was hoping for us to do more, to create more, because our attackers were not patient enough.
Every time when we were quite calm in the build-up but then we ended with our attackers [where] they should keep the ball longer and every time [they] forced a pass. The ball went behind and then we had to defend a long goal-kick again. We couldn’t control the game better but that was mainly to do with their playing style and how hard they made it for us.
On Dominik Szoboszlai playing at right-back…
Talking about mentality, it is not easy to play as a full-back if you’ve only been a midfielder in your career. He played there once in pre-season – I think it was against Stoke when we played behind closed doors – but in that game we only had the ball and now he had to defend a lot. For him to put in a performance like that, you can say a lot about his mentality – as you can about all the players because this was mentally such a difficult evening, such a difficult place to go to, such a difficult opponent to play against. For us to be able to get a result, let alone getting a win, is a big compliment for the boys.
On whether results like this ‘win titles’…
That is the last thing I think about in this moment, if I’m honest. Winning away at Newcastle then you definitely need to have quality, especially in an atmosphere like this. Not football quality because that’s not what we showed today – apart from the last goal we scored. That looked a little bit like what I see on a daily basis on the training ground. But to have the mentality to fight here in such a hostile stadium, that is definitely something you also need if you want to compete in the end. Winning is something else but at least competing you definitely need to have this mentality – and that’s what we showed.
