On an exciting run of fixtures ahead and whether that is ‘how he wants it at this stage of the season’…
Yeah, but that’s throughout the whole season how much you want it. But it’s also about who is available and who is not and I think the Brighton game summed our season up completely. So, after a great game midweek against Galatasaray, we immediately hit the setback the day after with Ali [Alisson Becker] and Mo being out. And then three minutes into the game, Hugo Ekitike went out and I think we could also see that in the second half, one or two players struggled with the fact that we played during midweek and those were the players that were not used to it yet because of injuries throughout the whole season.
But now, Mo is back. Ali unfortunately isn’t, but I think much more of our players are used to the programme now than they were in the beginning of the season. So now it’s up to us to show that we are ready for this tough fixture list. Tough in a sense of the opponents we face – but that’s completely normal if you are still in the FA Cup and if you’re still in the Champions League that you face tough opponents – and tough in a sense that it’s a lot of games with hardly any rest in between.
But we are now eight or nine months further than we were in the start of the season and I think more and more players are ready for this schedule than they were for large parts of the first half of the season.
On why big games seem to have brought the best out of the team so far this season…
Unfortunately, the one game we are playing tomorrow was probably the worst game we had in the sense of playing the big games, we lost there 3-0. Of course, there were referee decisions involved in that loss that made it harder for us, but they were much better in the first half than us. I think, and I’ve said this many times, why we have shown many times that we are a good team in big games, but also in other games, is that we have very good players and we can play very good football.
It’s been very hard for us and a struggle for us to play the amount of games, so every time after a good game, even this City game [in November] we played three days after we played Real Madrid, and that has been our biggest problem this season: struggling playing, after a good result or a bad result, so many games. That has been the biggest issue for this team and not the games themselves because we have shown that we have quality players and we are a very good team. But the amount of games have been our biggest issue.
That’s why I just said it’s interesting for us to see now where we are after seven or eight or nine months. We’ve played much better against them at home. At Anfield, I don’t think we deserved to lose, especially not after our second-half performance. Unfortunately, there was a big referee decision in that game as well, with the red card [not given] on Mo Salah, that didn’t go in our favour. But now we have to show that if there’s progress, we can also show that in an away game because it’s usually tougher to play away from home than at Anfield.