Jurgen Klopp says his squad are a major believer in the power of positivity and were focused on who was playing rather than those who were absent through injury as Liverpool produced a outstanding second half display to overwhelm Luton 4-1 at Anfield on Wednesday night.
Already without Alisson, Dominik Szoboszlai and Trent Alexander-Arnold before the weekend, the Reds then lost Curtis Jones and Diogo Jota to injuries that will see them miss weeks and possibly months of action.
And with the Carabao Cup final against Chelsea on Sunday, no risks were taken with Mo Salah, Darwin Nunez and Ibrahima Konate, the latter being a unused substitute while the two forwards were given the night off to rest any slight niggles they may have had.
It meant the front three had an unfamiliar look to normal with Harvey Elliott linking up with Cody Gakpo and Luis Diaz.
In a further example of Liverpool’s depth being tested, this starting lineup had an average age of 25 years and 68 days - the club's youngest since February 2018 while Liverpool's bench had five players aged 19 or under, with 16-year-old midfielder Trey Nyoni among the substitutes.
Not surprisingly, it took a period of time to gel and Liverpool as a whole looked far from themselves in a very scratchy first 45 minutes where the visitors led through Chiedozie Ogbene.
Klopp has been known throughout his tenure for his ability to truly inspire his players at the half time interval by keeping positive and thinking that they can turn around any deficit if they believe.
This was the sixth time during this campaign that they have turned a deficit into all three points.
Speaking after the win which restored Liverpool’s four point gap over Man City, Klopp cited an iconic victory which saw those memories personally flooding back (per the Official site.)
“I will mention this game quite a few times, to be honest. I promised my team a few months ago probably I will never mention or use the Barcelona game [in 2019] again as an example – and I used it today again, so I broke my promise. Just because before the game it was kind of similar: many players missing, stuff like this. If the team that played that night against Barcelona would have stuck to the knowledge of who was missing.
“This team (on that night) ignored the fact who was missing and I want us to ignore the fact [of] who is missing. That’s difficult because the public got the knowledge of the whole amount of players missing only tonight.
“It’s like, ‘Oh…’ I needed a few minutes to process it when I got all the news but from the moment on when you know how you can deal with it, how you can sort it for this game now, it feels really good.
“That’s what I wanted the boys to show and this is an example tonight, this is now their Barcelona, [it] was against Luton – a difficult situation, plenty of reasons to give up in moments, ‘Yeah, not tonight.’ And I saw only a super group fighting. If you don’t limit yourself with bad thoughts, you can fly. And that’s what the boys did."
With the cup final clearly now in the forefront of his mind, Klopp is taking nothing for granted on the injury front.
“Obviously for us there are now a lot of super-important games coming up, and we don’t know, we go day by day. I cannot say anything about it and I don’t know. But after Brentford I had no clue the situation would be like it was now. So, let’s see. There’s one phrase that stands: as long as we have 11, we will go for it. That’s all I can promise.”
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