NAPLES, Italy: Jurgen Klopp has said he needs to “reinvent” his Liverpool team after they suffered a 4-1 hammering against Napoli in their Champions League Group A opener on Wednesday.
Klopp’s side were overplayed in the first half and were lucky to fall just 3-0 down at the break and the German, who won the competition with Liverpool in 2019 and guided them to the final last season, said it there is still a lot to fix.
“It looks like we’re going to have to reinvent ourselves a little bit, so there’s really a lot of things missing, not in all games but now. The funny part is that we have to do this in the middle of a Premier League season and a Champions League campaign,” he told reporters.
“We need to find a setup to be a lot better at pretty much everything,” he added.
This season, Liverpool have also lost to Manchester United in the Premier League and drawn against Fulham, Crystal Palace and Everton.
However, in the heat of southern Italy, Liverpool put in their worst performance of the season, lacking even basic defense and pressing in midfield.
“It’s really hard to take, it’s not that hard to explain once you’ve seen the game. Okay, first of all, Napoli played a really good game, we didn’t, that’s the first explanation for the defeat,” said Klopp .
“They took a penalty and missed another, but we served the next two goals on one plate and we should defend better. We weren’t compact either defensively or offensively. Until Thiago (Alcantara) entered the pitch, I can’t help myself remember a counter-pressing situation, we were too wide,” he said.
But Klopp was baffled at the reason for the sudden loss of so many of his side’s qualities that have made them one of the top teams in Europe in recent seasons.
“Everything (wrong) is obvious but why it happened I can’t answer now, let me think about it. It’s a really tough cookie, but I have to take it.”