Arsenal Was Our Biggest Challenge – Klopp

Jurgen Klopp has said Liverpool’s 4-0 win over Arsenal proves they possess the ability to put in commanding attacking performances after only just a few days’ rest and even without a number of influential players.

Despite playing without the wantaway Philippe Coutinho and injured Adam Lallana, Liverpool netted four at Anfield for the second time in a week as they demolished Arsene Wenger’s side on Sunday afternoon.

Roberto Firmino, Sadio Mane, Mohamed Salah and second-half substitute Daniel Sturridge all scored to ensure Liverpool would go into the international break still unbeaten this season.

“All that we are doing must have to be independent from [absent] players,” Klopp told his postmatch news conference. “If we miss too many [absent players] then you have no chance. Nobody can do the same.

“We never thought about who we miss, even when we know how big the problems are when you don’t have these quality players involved.

“I’m not pleased about it, I expected it. That’s the job we have to do. You will never hear an excuse because we couldn’t deliver because of this or that.

“It’s intense, it’s all intense. We all know we cannot line up the same 11 players for five or six months, we need to have opportunities to change different positions.

“Today we decided for rhythm and confidence. I really thought a lot about the lineup. They all looked so positive after the Hoffenheim game in training and I thought: ‘Come on, let’s try again.’ Obviously it worked.

“So far in the season, we learned from each performance, from each game we played, different things.

“We played an outstandingly good game against Hoffenheim and today it was the next step because we did it again. That probably was the biggest challenge for us today.

“We need to learn that we can learn to do things like this [every] three or four days because otherwise we get a problem during the season. We wanted to show it today. We wanted to prove it to ourselves. We wanted to be spot on from the first second. We wanted to show our greed, our ambitions against a very strong side.

“You can never know if you can win a game, but we didn’t actually think about winning the game, we thought about the performance. The performance was perfect and the result is the result of the performance.”