Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp has said he wants his players to improve their levels of “passion and effort” after failing to win their opening three Premier League games.
The Merseyside club drew their first two games against Fulham and Crystal Palace before slipping to a 2-1 defeat against fierce rivals Manchester United on Monday.
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Liverpool welcome newly promoted Bournemouth to Anfield on Saturday and Klopp has urged his team to raise their game for the upcoming matches.
“We have to improve immediately,” he told a news conference on Friday. “We need 100% effort if not a little bit more, plus passion. It’s the highest level football. It’s all fine.
“The things we achieved were never easy, so no-one should expect it should be easy now. Let’s go for it together.”
He added: “My job is to put things right, I could learn a lot from life when things didn’t go well. It’s part of the job, to regroup, to find a perfect way together again to fight the outside world and not suffer.
“We’ve played much worse games at United but what was disappointing was we should have won this game… with 70% possession against a counter-attacking team.
Klopp also played down any suggestion of a rift between James Milner and Virgil van Dijk after the two clashed following Jadon Sancho‘s opening goal for United.
“Obviously, everyone saw it,” Klopp added. “I was a pretty emotional player in my time, and I had these kinds of conversations on the pitch more often than not with my best friends.
“There is nothing to clarify, really. It’s a situation when you are discussing things on the pitch. Especially nowadays, with all the cameras, then it looks much more serious that it is. It’s no problem at all.”
Klopp also confirmed that Joel Matip, Thiago Alcantara, Curtis Jones and Diogo Jota are getting closer to fitness but are still set to miss the Bournemouth clash.
Liverpool have signed Darwin Nunez, Fabio Carvalho, Calvin Ramsay this summer and Klopp said the club would be open to more arrivals before the transfer window closes on Sept. 1.
“We are actually working constantly on these kind of things,” he said. “They are too expensive or not the right player.
“One thing stays important — it needs to be the right player. We are working but we will see if something will happen or not. I don’t know.”
Information from Reuters was included in this report.
