Jurgen Klopp has sent a blunt message to his Liverpool players ahead of the 2022/23 season.
Klopp’s Liverpool faced off with RB Leipzig in a pre-season friendly on Thursday.
The Reds came away with a 5-0 win which saw Darwin Nunez net his first four goals for the club.
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Despite an empathic victory, though, Klopp has warned that Liverpool are not close to where they want to be physically:
“We need this time now,” Klopp said after the game. “We are not close to where we want to be physically and with the weather and everything, it is difficult. A little bit of Austria is good, we have to work to get through this, we have to work extremely hard and then it will be fine.
“I’m not sure if against Salzburg we will be really fine because we properly go for it, but we will give it a try and the most important part of pre-season starts now.”
On the result itself, Klopp added: “I would have bought it [off you] actually! And it’s really nice. In the first half, some good moments, some less good moments, not enough movement and we need to get used to how it is to play 60, 70 or 90 minutes. The human body is like this but we’ll get used to it again.
“So after a 15-minute break [at half time] we played football again and I wanted us to be a bit harder on ourselves, it’s pre-season, but [I wanted them to] move more and second half Hendo (Jordan Henderson) and Millie (James Milner) came on and they were lively like hell. Then we created chances.”
Liverpool have one more pre-season match vs RB Salzburg on Wednesday before then facing Manchester City for the Community Shield on July 30th.
The Reds then take on Strasbourg in their final friendly of the summer one day later before kicking off their 2022/23 vs Fulham on August 6th.
