Posted by It’d be reasonable to think that Jurgen Klopp is riding high after Liverpool hung a victory up after their match with league leaders Leicester City.
But the German isn’t all songs and praise when it comes to Liverpool’s progress. The team had climbed as high as 6th in the league from 10th, but now sit in 8th after their boxing day victory.
Klopp hasn’t hesitated to let his strikers know that the lack of production is on them. He isn’t impressed with only four goals in the last five matches. Despite Benteke pulling out the winning goal, Klopp isn’t impressed with his overall level of play:
“We are not a team who can play with a striker who scores a goal but is not involved in the game for the other 89 minutes.”
“We need the striker for the other options too, to work for the other minutes.”
Klopp saved some shade for Sturridge as well who has been largely inactive in 2015 due to repeated injuries. The boss isn’t pleased that Sturridge is taking to social media to broadcast his good health.
“I think this is absolutely the same thing that Daniel said four weeks ago, and we let him play and he was injured again.”
“He says this, you ask him and he says he’s good. I know he is good, but he has to train. We can not change the situation, he has to train now.”
“Everybody sees him training and they think ‘oh, come on, bring him into the team, we need his quality’. But no. We really, really have to be patient now, we have to wait, we have to train, we have to give the body the right information, and if he can do this, then maybe we can change something.”
It appears that Klopp has had enough of ‘the boy who cried injured’ routine and isn’t willing to start working Sturridge into the line-up until he’s certain that Sturridge will be a healthy and consistent part of the system.
Further, if the two strikers don’t get it together and start earning their keep it wouldn’t be shocking for Klopp to loan or transfer the stars out for some of his own recruited talent.
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