Jurgen Klopp has urged Liverpool’s players to use Ben Doak ‘more often’ and has warned his squad that they will not ‘fly’ through the Europa League group stage after beating LASK on Thursday night.
Liverpool went a goal down in their Group E opener but a penalty from Darwin Nunez pulled Jurgen Klopp’s side level in the second half before goals from Luis Diaz and Mohamed Salah sealed a 3-1 win in Austria.
Doak, meanwhile delivered a lively performance on Liverpool’s right flank and Klopp said after the game that he is keen for his squad to utilise the 17-year-old more frequently.
‘I know how the world is and I know that people expect us to fly through this competition. It will not happen,’ Klopp said after Liverpool’s win.
‘It will not happen in the group stage, it will not happen in the knockout stage. It will not happen.
‘We have to dig into it and that’s what we did. It was a massive learning curve tonight, the opponent suffered much less from the pitch than we did, which is a little bit normal because we had the ball more often. But besides that we had to get used to it. So we can learn so much.
‘If we would have used Ben Doak a little bit more often, given him the ball, I think he would have got the ball more times on the touchline and passed the ball inside or whatever.
‘Stefan [Bajcetic] found a way into the game after a rather difficult start, but we caused him problems obviously with the timing of our passes.
‘Ryan [Gravenberch] played a super game in really difficult circumstances and was really decisive for us.
‘Ibou [Konate] could get 80 minutes I think, Stefan could get minutes. So there were so many positives and I am cheeky enough to be really happy about that game.’
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