klopp
Jurgen Klopp has said he and the team "still suffer" from Liverpool's 3-1 Europa League final loss to Sevilla in May, but he was quick to add that everyone is ready to move on.
Liverpool
put in some remarkable performances to reach the Basel final, most
notably a quarterfinal second leg comeback against Klopp's former club
Borussia Dortmund and a 3-0 second leg semifinal win versus Villarreal
at Anfield.
However, the team came up short against three-time winners Sevilla,
and the German boss writes some of that off to fatigue from the effort
they put in to make it to the championship match in the first place.
Klopp told English newspapers:
"Of course, I've had a lot of thoughts about this. It was long ago but
it still feels bad. You have the moments when you still suffer a little
bit.
"It was a hard night and a hard few days afterwards but it is
in the past and like all games in the past if you can use them you
should do."
Although Klopp said he and the team needed to learn
from the defeat, it wasn't something he wanted to dwell on, saying: "You
can't bring all of this up in the first meeting and say [to the
players] 'look, I hope you had a wonderful holiday, but I want to tell
you the second half in Basel was not so good.'"
Leading 1-0 after the half-time break through a Daniel Sturridge
strike, Liverpool conceded within the first minute to Unai Emery's team,
as Kevin Gameiro scored past Simon Mignolet. Coke added two more goals
in the 64th and 70th minutes to seal the Reds' fate and spoil their
dreams of a return to the Champions League.
"Then what happened
happened. When you watch it again you see that something broke at that
moment," Klopp said of the second-half letdown. "Different players had
no weapons any more; they had no power and no confidence. You saw that.
We went too deep in a lot of positions and we were not close enough to
the challenges.
"All of it was not too good but it was, of course,
about the intensity that we had had on the way to the final, we'd had
to overperform one or two times, we had to play very special games and
we'd had a lot of games.
"We'd tried everything to have fresh legs
for the final, but none of this is an excuse because this was not a
final that we should have lost but we lost and that's the truth.
"We
had no luck in the game, Sevilla had a few moments in the first half
when they needed a bit of luck and they had it, but it's over and it
doesn't feel as bad now as it did at the time."
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