Jurgen Klopp believes Liverpool have taken a “little step” in the right direction as he defended the dull stalemate with Chelsea.
The two sides slugged out an incident-free goalless Premier League draw at a bitterly-cold Anfield on Saturday afternoon.
The result delivered a further blow to the Reds’ hopes of closing the gap to the Champions League qualification places and left them marooned in mid-table at the halfway point of the campaign.
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But Klopp has pointed to the performance being a marked improvement on the dreadful 3-0 reverse at Brighton and Hove Albion in Liverpool’s last top-flight game a week ago.
“Usually a point against Chelsea is not a bad result but I feel I have to say ‘it’s okay’ because people think ‘how can you not win against them?’,” said the Reds boss. “Chelsea will win a lot of games I can promise you, and today they didn’t and that’s good.
“I saw some good signs but we have to do the good things longer and better for the full 95 or 100 minutes and we are there. We will go in that direction, I am sure.
“It’s the strongest league in the world and I don’t think anybody would argue with that. But that we don’t do as good as we could has nothing to do with the quality of other teams, to be honest. It’s self-made. Not everything our fault but self-made and that's why we are where we are. We have to go from here and have to improve.”
Klopp added: “For me, it’s clear in this situation that you have to be ready for little steps, and this was a little step today. That’s how it is. I expect progress and from the last league game it was progress, definitely. That’s important.
“The distance (to the top four) we only can influence by winning. We cannot all lose, some of them will win and draw. There are a lot of games to play. To get there we have to continue with the things again we did now and for the last two games I saw progress. That’s good.”
Klopp was taking charge of his 1,000th game as a manager having started out at Mainz back in 2001. And the Liverpool boss admits his side were guilty of gifting possession too easily to a Chelsea side who remain below them in the table.
“Before the game I got a lot of messages and all of them were nice,” said Klopp. “I think Arsene Wenger lost his 1,000th game 6-0, so I’m really happy that that didn’t happen!
“I liked the start of the first half and particularly the start of the second half. That was good and we have to extend these spells. We have to play more football, especially in the first half when we won balls back, when we defended really well and were really aggressive, then we gave the ball too easily away.
“But there were other moments where we played pretty well and didn’t get it to create a no-brainer (chance) or whatever.”
Klopp continued: “Even Thiago, who is obviously a great footballer, gave balls away with unforced errors. That’s what we have to do better. If we do that and defend well and play in those moments and use each other more, all of a sudden it looks completely different. That’s where we have to get to.
“In a lot of moments, really compact, really being together, a lot of challenges but because the opponent is there as well you have to defend with passion. We didn’t do that too well last week, but today we did. When you have a block in the last second like Robbo did that’s really important. These things are positives and from there we go.”
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