Jurgen Klopp plays down Liverpool defeat and praises promising youngster

A youthful side were beaten at Anfield by three first-half goals from the Ligue 1 outfit, as the Reds wrapped up their pre-season schedule. The focus now turns towards the start of the 2022-23 Premier League campaign, which sees Klopp's men travel to Fulham on Saturday for a lunchtime kick-off.

"Yeah, that's the main thing for a night like this. So look, I said it before the game, when we planned this game then obviously we thought we have to do it for the first-team squad really, for the first-team players because usually today we could have played the striker who didn't start yesterday, Diogo, Oxlade, Naby, Curtis, and now on matchday Naby's ill and Curtis felt a little bit and we couldn't take any risk and all of a sudden the team is really young and you play a really strong Strasbourg side."

"I said to the boys tonight after the game, I'm really proud of the second half, of the reaction, because these boys in their age groups, they are usually always the best and now we make the step to adult football and I loved the reaction. The first half, we saw the goals. We made mistakes but Strasbourg used them really well. I think first three shots were a goal and that made it, of course, difficult to stay positive, which is very important in a football game."

More Liverpool news:

"But we found a way back and second half was obviously much better. I loved a lot of performances really, how the boys buy in in the way we want to play. But when there's no real striker on the pitch, it makes life really tricky and we played in their hands with that because how they set it up with a 5-3 is that the more passes you play, the tighter the spaces get, the more likely you lose the ball. When you lose the ball, you have a counter-attack with their physical strength up front."

Harvey Elliott's performance

"We are not surprised about that, we know Harvey now for a long time and he improves every day and that's really important. But what you could see today, he could do that after 88 minutes and you saw yesterday a very intense game where we were all struggling, and Harvey didn't look like he struggled at all today physically. That he's a good footballer, it's clear. But a player like Harvey needs target players as well and that's what we were lacking today. Fabio's good, all the boys who came on were really good, the kids – Bobby Clark, Tyler Morton again really good, Stefan played a really good game, felt a little bit so we took him off because of that. So many good performances.