Just following on from that, in terms of your character, your personality, what can fans expect from you? What kind of personality or character would you say that you have as a coach?<\/p>\n
It’s the most difficult question probably, no?! ‘Try to describe yourself.’ I don’t like to do this at all. I think you have the advantage that you’ve already seen me three years at least in the Premier League. I think everyone kind of; some of them will know me better, the others maybe they don’t know me, but the people involved in football more or less will know what we are going to try to do.<\/p>\n
Obviously I understand that this is Liverpool. We have to change some things. We have to change a little bit even tactically, even on the pitch. But if they sign me, it’s because they want a lot of things that I was doing before in other clubs. So, I wouldn’t like to change in the pitch the DNA of what has been my teams and also outside. How I am going to answer your questions, how I’m going to relate to the supporters, I will try to be as natural as possible and I hope it doesn’t change me a lot.<\/p>\n
There has been a lot of change at the club this summer so what are your expectations for next season? Do you feel it might be a season of transition or can Liverpool challenge for honours?<\/p>\n
I think we have to accept there are difficult situations right now in terms of, I would say, both sides: a lot of senior players leaving, very important players that have achieved almost everything here in the club, and also some of the very important players [who are] injured. You know, we haven’t started training and we already have, especially in the cases of Hugo Ekitike, Conor Bradley, Giovanni Leoni, long injuries. <\/p>\n
So, in terms of also improving the team we have to consider [that] we have to replace very important players that were making very good numbers, and also we have the situation with, especially those three, big injuries that are going to miss some time that we also have to find a way to replace. We know that these three players, for example, I love them, they are the long-term solutions, I’m sure. You know about Conor, about Giovanni, about Hugo, but there is going to be, especially in Hugo’s case, a period where we will be without them and we have to try to find solutions also.<\/p>\n
How important are your core coaching principles, such as playing vertically and attacking with speed, now you are here?<\/p>\n
Yes, I think they have to be our core principles. After we will have a lot of games, a lot of questions that you ask me about, ‘What if you face low blocks and this [kind of thing]?’ I always say, I prefer to face low blocks in terms of, ‘OK, we will be in control of the game, probably we will concede less chances, we will spend a lot of time in the opposition half and those are the scenarios that we have to find.’ Some teams, they give you straight away that situation, perfect, other teams they don’t give it straight away because they will try also to control the game, to play in your half. I’m looking forward to spending as much time as we can in the opposition half, with the ball, without the ball, because I feel we are closer to scoring than the opposition if that is the situation.<\/p>\n
It has been reported that you have signed a two-year contract here and that length of deal has been your preference throughout your career. Why is that the case?<\/p>\n
Yeah, two-year deals, I always say, in terms of coaching, contracts don’t matter a lot. I don’t want to be in a place because I have a contract because, ‘Oh, we are not sure, but you have a contract so we stay.’ No, it’s like, ‘OK, I think I signed two years, but it’s basically year to year.’ When you are a coach, we’ve seen a lot of managers, they have long contracts and because the club doesn’t want, because they don’t want\u2026 because in the end, when you are a player it is very important, I think the contract is very important. <\/p>\n
But when you are a manager [it is not]\u2026 don’t worry, I hope I can stay here two years \u2013 no, a lot more years, it would mean that I’ve done a very good job, but I feel we have to earn [that]. Managers, we have to earn every year the right to continue, especially in clubs like Liverpool, but I do it everywhere. I’ve done it always like this, yes.<\/p>\n
How are you planning to manage the extra workload and games Liverpool have during a season in terms of the aggressive style of play you want to implement? How important is the size of your squad in being able to manage that?<\/p>\n
Yes, I think it’s a big challenge for me. I think it is a big change because here most of the weeks are not going to be clean, in terms of we will have a midweek game. I think it is also a great opportunity for the players because I always loved to have these kind of seasons as a player. You basically don’t train a lot, you play, recover, play, recover. I think there is a chance to use more players also because it’s impossible to deal with this kind of season with 13, 14, 15 players, you need all the squad.<\/p>\n
And there are positives on this, but also we have to get ready because in this kind of hard season, a lot of games, injuries will happen, situations will happen. So, we have to get ready in terms of squad depth so we can deal with the demands of the competition and we can go through those months, especially here in England, December, January, February, you know those months are really hard and we have to arrive to those months in a situation where we can deal with them, yes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Just following on from that, in terms of your character, your personality, what can fans expect from you?…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":760702,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[1720,1721,1708,1716,1710,1722,1724,1723,1711,1715,1714,1709,1719,1712,1717,403,99,1713,1718],"class_list":["post-760701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-alisson","tag-firmino","tag-homepage","tag-klopp","tag-lfc","tag-lfc-news","tag-lfctv","tag-lfctv-go","tag-liverpool-fc","tag-liverpool-fc-match","tag-liverpool-fc-news","tag-liverpool-football-club","tag-mane","tag-reds","tag-salah","tag-soccer","tag-sports","tag-the-reds","tag-van-dijk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=760701"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760701\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/760702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=760701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=760701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=760701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}