Jurgen Klopp hails Liverpool’s progress

LONDON — Jurgen Klopp was trying to not get ahead of himself, but he couldn’t quite make it to the end of his post-match press conference without positivity flowing through his words.

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Liverpool beat Tottenham 2-1 at Wembley on Saturday to extend their 100 percent record to start the season as they sit top of the Premier League table with five wins from five.

It is only the third time in their history that they’ve opened up a top-flight season with five wins on the spin and although it’s early days, plenty of fans and pundits believe they’re the main contenders to Manchester City for the title.

Klopp knows it is early days, but he is delighted with the progress his team has made as he hailed their best performance of the season so far.

“The performance today was better than the result. Result is perfect and winning here is so difficult, unbelievably difficult,” Klopp said. “It was a really outstanding performance that the boys delivered today. We could have scored more. We controlled the game in a way and let me say it was the best game of the season for us, for sure. We had 85 brilliant minutes.”

Klopp acknowledged that Spurs had a chance to grab a point at the end as Erik Lamela scored in injury time and then Heung-Min Son went down in the box for what looked like a penalty kick, at least from Mauricio Pochettino‘s point of view, but Liverpool were the dominant side throughout and were wasteful on the break.

The German coach said his team would have lost if they’d been ‘5 percent less’ with their performance, but they weren’t and they won again as talk about them winning the title continues.

Klopp knows issues will arise throughout the long and winding campaign, but that air of positivity reared its head once again.

Liverpool has a wonderful vibe surrounding them right now, but they do have a gruesome schedule coming up.

Two games against Chelsea (PL and League Cup), plus a crunch league game with Manchester City and UEFA Champions League clashes with PSG and Napoli await.

“I don’t have the personality to wait for problems, but I’m old enough to know they will come,” Klopp said. “It’s not often in my life I’ve had surprised. We all have the same situation in a football team. I am long enough now in this business to know nobody will play the perfect season. Not even City last season played the perfect season. That’s no problem. I only say it is still early, five games, fantastic we won all the game. Fantastic the improvement we had. The best game so far was the first matchday, but it depends a bit of the opponent maybe. This today was by far the best performance of the season. I like that development. Now we have to prove that and do it again and again and again. We will see if we can do so.”

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