Liverpool made a winning start to their Europa League campaign after coming from behind to beat LASK 3-1 in Austria.
Jurgen Klopp’s side trailed at half-time after a stunning strike from Florian Flecker, who fired home from the edge of the area after being picked out from a set-piece.
The German made multiple changes to his side from the weekend win at Wolves and Liverpool initially struggled to control proceedings in Linsk.
Liverpool eventually levelled the game after the break through a Darwin Nunez penalty, before Ryan Gravenberch – making his full debut for the Reds – set up Luis Diaz to put the visitors in front. Mohamed Salah came off the bench to seal the win late on in Liverpool’s first game in this competition since the 2016 final.
“I know how the world is and I know that people expect us to fly through this competition. It will not happen,” Klopp said at his post-match press conference.
“It will not happen in the group stage, it will not happen in the knockout stage. We have to dig in, which we did. It was a massive learning curve tonight, the opponent suffered much less from the pitch than we did. We had to get used to it. So we can learn so much.”
Victory was Klopp’s 50th European win in charge of Liverpool, becoming the first manager in the club’s history to achieve the feat.
“Let me say it like this, if I have still 50 after the group stage then I’m still the most successful Liverpool manager [in this regard] and everybody will hate the fact! [It’s] nice,” Klopp said.
“We played quite a lot of games in Europe. It’s good that we won that many, we have qualified for four finals. It’s great but probably it’s because in European competition there are just much more games than in the past. I’m pretty sure that’s the reason.”
