Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp says he sent a “long, long” text message to his players the day after the Reds’ 7-2 defeat to Aston Villa. In a recent interview, the German remarked he wasn’t in the best mood following the shock loss but after discussing his thoughts with the team, he felt they could move on from the chastening experience:

“The night after the game was not the best night of my life, let me say it like this. But I got up in the morning and I knew I had to speak to my boys but they were not here [at Melwood] so I texted them a long, long message with pretty much my thoughts on the things that happened and after that, I felt much better, because it was out. And then, from that moment on, we could carry on, and that’s what we did.”

Klopp is now interested to see how his players react when they come up against an Everton team this weekend who have won all four of their league games so far this campaign:

“Now we are here, we have really enough time to deal with it. Losing a game is exactly the opposite of what you want, losing it 7-2 makes it, of course, worse but sometimes you have to show that it can be useful. We have the chance to show that on Saturday lunchtime against Everton. So that makes it really interesting because we face a team that is flying, obviously, and we got a proper knock so now let’s see who deals better with what.”

As Klopp mentions, the Merseyside derby is an early kick-off on Saturday, meaning both teams will have very limited preparation time following the international break. Combined with a lack of fans in the ground, we could well see a sluggish start from both teams but Liverpool, in particular, will be determined to get some sort of result from the game following the Villa debacle.