Jurgen Klopp has questioned the body language of some of his Liverpool players after their reign as FA Cup holders was ended.
An injury-time goal from Kaoru Mitoma sent Liverpool tumbling to a 2-1 fourth-round defeat at Brighton and Hove Albion on Sunday afternoon.
Harvey Elliott had given the visitors an early lead only for Brighton to equalise shortly before half-time when a Tariq Lamptey shot deflected in off Lewis Dunk.
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And Klopp wasn’t happy with the manner of a number of Reds players as their hopes of domestic silverware for this season were thwarted.
“This is really a way you can get knocked out of a cup competition,” he said. “If we are in a better situation, 10 points more in the league or something like this, and then you lose at Brighton then you say ‘respect’, because what they do is really good.
“But we are obviously in a situation where we want to make the final step. That’s why it feels now especially bad in this moment, because it didn’t happen. We made a step in the right direction but you can imagine nobody want to hear that any more, I cannot hear it any more. But it’s still right. Then we go from there.
“We have to build on these kind of things. We have to improve and the body language from a couple of the boys has to be much better.”
Asked to elaborate on his point, Klopp said: “What else is there to say? When I speak about body language today, it wasn’t okay, next time it should be better.
“Look, I’m not over the moon about this performance. But again, the only thing that happened really is we lost against a good side which we lost to two weeks ago in a horrendous game. Today was much better.
“I understand 100% why people aren’t happy with the game. But it’s just the situation we are in. There’s no other way than to fight through. You’d never hear a manager in this situation say ‘we’ll change that and you will see against Wolves and that’s it’. It doesn’t go like this. That’s why we keep working 100%.
“We have still space for improvement. We have made steps but we have to improve further and that’s what we will do. It’s important that we lift ourselves.
“That last game here we couldn’t have won, no chance. I was happy we didn’t lose by more. But today nobody would have been surprised had we won. That’s good, but for today and the competition, it’s not good enough.”
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