Jurgen Klopp has admitted Liverpool were ‘horrible to watch’ in the first half of the club’s costly 1-0 defeat at home to Crystal Palace.
Liverpool’s title hopes suffered a huge blow as the Reds lost at home in the Premier League for the first time since October 2022, with Eberechi Eze’s goal handing the Eagles a shock win.
Just days after Liverpool lost 3-0 to Atalanta in the Europa League on home soil, Klopp’s side were again below their best in a first-half performance that saw the visitors create a number of good goalscoring opportunities.
The Merseysiders improved after the break but were wasteful in front of goal, with Darwin Nunez, Curtis Jones and Mohamed Salah guilty of missing the best chances.
Klopp could not hide his disappointment at full-time and said Liverpool suffered a hangover from their European defeat on Thursday night.
“If you would look to my teams over the years, I think you could say our pressing is usually good,” Klopp said to Sky Sports.
“Counterpress is there. The first half we were open like ‘how can that happen?’ Curtis [Jones] was the only one really chasing, really getting out and from time to time broke their rhythm. Beisde that they [Palace] could just play through. They [Liverpool] were horrible to watch.
“Was this a hangover (from Atalanta defeat)? Yes. That’s how humans react sometimes. It’s not great but it happens. The conviction wasn’t there. We were much too far apart from each other. Last line too deep, the midfield wasn’t really there, first line didn’t start the press. So that’s all true.
“Where it’s coming from? How can I answer that one 100%? But it’s only a few days ago that we played a bad game so it might have something to do with that. Actually it was a really good game, without scoring. But it’s not that easy unfortunately.
“I am standing here and to talk about this game is really tricky,” Klopp continued.
“Two different games I would say, with the first half and second half. First half was absolutely not good enough so we showed a reaction. The reaction was we lost conviction from the last game. We tried to get rid of this but that work out as much as we wanted.
“To concede that goal was a horrible goal to concede with a completely free player in the area. That cannot happen but it happens. Andy Robertson gets the other ball so it’s like scoring a goal if you don’t concede from that. Crystal Palace didn’t have many more and we controlled it better and then second half we can easily say if we don’t score with these chances what can you say?
“The game in the second half was much better, Trent coming on and in the moment the structure changed. We caused problems and we had big big chances. If we stand here and win the game 4-1 we could have seen the same game with a completely different result. But we didn’t so we have to take that.”
