20 October 2023 , 21:30
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Jurgen Klopp will not consider asking his players to be wary of discipline ahead of the Merseyside derby, despite a controversial rash of red cards this season.
Since he became manager in 2016, Liverpool have had by far the best disciplinary record in the Premier League - and Europe - with only nine red cards in total in eight years before the start of the current campaign. That is almost 450 matches, but there have already been FOUR in just eight matches so far this season.
One, for Alexis Mac Allister, was overturned, another red for two yellows picked up by Diogo Jota was wrong but couldn’t be overturned, and a third for an innocuous challenge by Curtis Jones resulted in a ridiculously harsh three-game ban. Yet in Klopp’s first full five seasons in charge at Anfield, his team topped the Premier League Fair Play table, and were second the season after.
It has led to serious questions about referees from fans in Liverpool games this season, a doubt which was exacerbated by the most astonishing decision by any Premier League official ever, when VAR Darren England ruled out a perfectly good goal at Spurs through “significant human error”.
Klopp though, is adamant that despite the tough calls which have constantly gone against his side this season, he can NOT ask his players to adapt their behaviour, even for the notoriously combustible Mersey derby. No English game has seen more red cards, with an astonishing 20 players sent off in the past 25 years, but Klopp insisted: “No we can not take the ways things have been into account - no. I don’t think you can.
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“If you actually look at it, we should have (only) one red card and that was the Virgil van Dijk one, so how can I work with that? What should I tell the players, be careful? Careful of what? (Should I tell) Diogo Jota: ‘don’t touch the player’? It doesn’t help because he didn’t touch the player and got sent off anyway. So no, there is nothing we can do.”
Klopp is certain three of four Liverpool red cards should not have been brandished this season, and he believes his side are the fairest in the league…with history backing him up. “If you want to have a look into it, you will see in my eight years here, before we were five or six times we won the Fair Play competition. So we didn’t get [a trophy] but we got the least yellow, the least red. I think two or three times we won that competition in Europe. So (it is clear) we don’t kick other players, we want to win the ball.”
Klopp though, will not send any message to officials, despite the alarming series of errors this season. Saturday’s derby referee Craig Pawson gave a penalty to a young Dominic-Calvert Lewin back in 2017 when Reds defender Dejan Lovren appeared to shoulder charge him. And there was an even worse decision, when Calvert-Lewin won a penalty in 2021.
But Klopp remained diplomatic, when he said: “I can’t say anything. The referee for (Saturday’s) derby gave a penalty against us? I have no memory of these kind of things, so I can’t say anything!”