On Ryan Gravenberch’s performance in role No. 6…
For me it’s always about the team, so when the individual performance is really good it’s because the team is really good. Everyone highlights the goal that Mo scored and his assist, but both goals came from a build-up situation where we started once with Virgil and the other time I think even with Alisson (Becker). So we have to make sure those players, the attackers, get into promising positions and the team has to help them with that. The same goes for Ryan. Of course Ryan is attack-minded but when we play with him the rest of the team has to help him too. The attackers and the attacking midfielders have to work really hard to help him with that but what we know about Ryan is that he can play the ball forward when he sees opportunities. That helped us today, especially in the second half.
About his first impressions of the Premier League …
When I started here I was told a lot of things but one of them was that Jürgen (Klopp) hated the 12.30 kick-off and today the team showed that we hated the 12.30 kick-off because we weren’t in the game in the first half. And the second thing people told me is that there are no easy games in the Premier League and we showed that today. If you play against a newly promoted team and they can try as hard as they did in the first half, they can make it as difficult for us as they did, then there’s probably a lot more to come. And that’s why it’s also important for us to have weeks like the ones we have coming up where we can work with the team to prepare them even better than we prepared them today because the first half wasn’t good enough. The second half was a really good performance.
On Gravenberch’s play in defensive midfield…
We defend with 11 players, but not with one player. We have to help him as much as we help anyone else in the position he or anyone else plays. It’s not that just Virgil (van Dijk) and Ibou defend, or just Virgil and Jarell (Quansah) – the whole team has to do that. When we defend with 11, it helps Ryan a lot or whoever plays there. Last season, Macca (Alexis Mac Allister) played there a lot and I think he has certain qualities that Ryan has as well. When you look at both players, you think about possession first and that’s why we as a team have to make sure that whoever plays in that position is not too exposed. That’s what happened today because I think the team really helped to defend in the best way possible and that’s why Ryan performed well.
On the question of how close the second half was to what he would like to see from the team in the future…
I don’t think it’s the first time in nine years for Liverpool fans to see the team play really well! I took over a very, very good team with a lot of great individual players but those players also need to understand that what they did in the first half is not enough. If they play to their maximum they can play really, really well and they showed that in the second half today. It was nice to see the goals we scored but I think the attack probably could have been better. Match of the day Tonight, too, the best game was one that didn’t result in a goal, and that was the one that Lucho shot just over the bar. I want to see the team do more and more and more and more if they can.
On finding Salah’s runs behind the defence to score goals…
The way the other team defends, we have to find an answer to that. Today Ipswich took the risk of always playing one-on-one all over the field, so their centre-back was always kicking towards Dominik Szoboszlai. That means three defenders against three of our attackers and then we have to recognise those moments and then make sure we put those three players in dangerous situations. And then that doesn’t mean continuing to play short, we have to find them with direct passes or passes into depth. And that led to them not taking that risk anymore and from that moment on we had a lot of time to play and build up our play, which you saw at the end of the second half. We have to recognise how the other team defends and then we have to find our answer. We did that really well in the second half.
