You can’t give away mistakes like we did today
Burnley went down to a 4-2 defeat at Anfield this afternoon with Liverpool coming from a goal behind to beat us, and it was a result that pleased their manager Jürgen Klopp as he saw his side go within one point of leaders Manchester City even though he thought both of our goals should have been disallowed.
“It was a good game,” he said. “A difficult game but a good game. We all know it is always difficult against Burnley for different reasons, and today there were a few more circumstances together that made it even more difficult.
“One of them was the early goal we conceded; usually it would have been disallowed if Andre [Marriner] has a better view of it, I don’t know exactly. I saw in the first moment it was a foul and now I have seen pictures you cannot treat the goalie like this, it should not happen, but they scored.
“Wonderful play for first goal, a little one-two in the box, Mo presses it through, Bobby easy goal. The second one, Adam Lallana fantastic counter-pressing block, Sadio could finish it off. The third one I think would have been a penalty but Bobby is there again.
“Then, of course, they scored the next one; I think it was a foul but there were more serious fouls in the history of football. We have to react better. I haven’t seen it back, but while the ball bounced in our box, Crouchy was now on the pitch and I think he was involved somehow, nobody could defend the ball really well and they scored a second.
” It becomes a bit tricky all of a sudden, but the boys reacted well, scored a fantastic fourth goal – really nice. I think if Sadio goes down it is again [a penalty]. It was good, 4-2, brilliant result. We knew it is really difficult against Burnley, it always is for us but most of the time we could win, and we always felt the work we did. That’s how it should be, all good.”
Despite the result, Sean Dyche saw plenty of positives in our performance, none more so than the performance of Dwight McNeil, although he wasn’t happy with the way we conceded the goals.
Speaking after the game, he said: “You can’t give away mistakes like we did today, definitely three out of the four, and you could argue all four. You can’t give away errors anyway in the Premier League, but certainly not at places like this.
“That’s my only gripe because a lot of the performance was very good, and the mentality was spot-on. Dwight McNeil was outstanding so, strangely, there were a lot of good things, which sounds mad when you lose 4-2.
“I was pleased with the changes and then you nick a goal, a good goal with a very clever ball around the corner from Vyds and Jόhann finished it nicely, and you wonder ‘is it that grandstand finish coming at our end?’ The fans are going mad and they can smell it, I can smell it and then we make another error and the game’s gone. There were lots of good things, but I’m not naïve enough to think you can make errors like that.”
He added: “We were written off after five games and written off after 19 games and yet we’re still here and still fighting and that’s what we will be doing. You have to think in the now, but the bigger picture is that after five games we had one point, after 19 games we had 12 points.
“If you’d had said to me ‘I can guarantee you 30 by now with eight games to go and five at home’, I’d have ripped your hand of. We can’t forget that, while also looking at the immediacy. We haven’t won in three and the next one is a big game, as they all are. We have to keep approaching it with the mentality we showed today, no matter what the score is, to keep going and keep working for everything we can get. We’ve come a long way. There’s been a lot of work done and there’s got to be more done.”
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