The head coach spoke with the media at Anfield ahead of the Reds’ home Champions League tie against PSV on Wednesday night.
Read a summary from the briefing below.
On how much of an issue confidence is among his players currently…
I think until now it hasn’t been an issue. If you look at the way we played most parts of the [Nottingham Forest] game, and I think I said after the game on Saturday, that the first half an hour was actually everything I hoped it would be except for us scoring a goal. It hasn’t been every game this season that we have been able to create that much in the first half an hour against a team that was defending low. So that was, for me, positive, but the first time they arrive in our 18-yard box with a set-piece they score a goal and then it took a while for us to recover from that and in the first minute after half-time we conceded again.
And then again I saw a team that was trying a lot, so I even showed them yesterday or the day before how many times we arrived in their box and how many crosses we gave – and I think that was six or seven times the amount Forest gave a cross – but they defended much better in their box than we defended in and around our box and that is what everyone keeps reminding us of, and we keep reminding ourselves of that as well. So, we have to help ourselves defensively a bit more – I’m not talking about the last line, I’m talking about the whole team, because then maybe people will also see that on the ball we are not doing so many things differently than last season. But the amount of goals we concede is of course the big difference between this and last season.