Klopp Critical Over Referee Decisions In Liverpool Loss

The manager believes that Liverpool were denied two clear
penalties.

It’s never a sign of prosperity for a team when their manager is
gnashing his teeth in frustration over refereeing in a game.
Usually Klopp keeps a cool head and avoids Mourinho-ing to
reporters. However, after it seems that the combination of the loss
to Southampton mixed with what he considered poor
decisions from the referee made the boss snap back.

The Reds spent 88 minutes chasing the game to no avail after
their own former player, Danny Ings, scored against them in the
second minute.

Klopp believes that his team was denied two clear penalties in
the second half. The first was a handball by Jack Stephens, about
which Klopp
said, “[The handball] looked like a clear penalty. I turned to
the fourth official, he said: ‘We checked already, no
penalty.’”

Ignoring the challenge on Sadio Mane from Kyle Walker-Peters
earned Andre Marriner a rebuke from Klopp by name.

“What [referee] Andre Marriner did with Sadio Mane tonight, I’m
not sure that’s OK, to be honest,” he said.

“The best situations we had were with Sadio having the ball at
his feet. For anyone to say he is a diver is the biggest joke in
the world. He tries to stay on his feet. He had two situations
where other teams would get a penalty for it.”

He then pulled out a fascinating statistic, musing, “I hear now
that Manchester United had more penalties in two
years than I had in five and a half years. I’ve no idea if that’s
my fault, or how that can happen.

“But it’s no excuse for the performance. We cannot change it, we
have to respect the decisions. But we can change our performance.
That’s our focus now.”

Performance has been a big problem for Liverpool as the injury
crisis seems to finally catch up to them. Hopefully he can work
some magic to change the narrative before Liverpool face Manchester
United on January 17th.