Seville, Nov 22 (IANS) Liverpool head coach Jurgen Klopp feels they “stopped playing football” in the second half, helping Sevilla to comeback from being three goals down to draw 3-3 in a Champions League group stage clash.

“It’s a very good first half and not that good second half,” Klopp was quoted as saying by BT Sport after the match on Tuesday night.

“We stopped playing football in the second half. We let them come back in the game. With this crowd behind their back, things like this can happen,” he said.

Liverpool missed out on the chance to cement their place in the knockout stages of the Champions League after a second-half collapse at the Ramon Sanchez Pizjuan Stadium.

Roberto Firmino scored twice in the first half with Sadio Mane adding another as Liverpool took a 3-0 lead at half-time but Wassam Ben Yedder netted twice — the second goal from the penalty spot after an Alberto Moreno foul — before Guido Pizarro scored deep into injury time as Liverpool failed to clear a corner kick.

“We did it already the other way around. You like this when you can change the game and come back in the game. When you are the winning team then you should avoid it, and we didn’t,” he said.

“We have a real weapon and that’s playing football. We didn’t do it in the second half until we conceded the second goal. After that, we came back and had our chances a little bit. We didn’t use them, so they could do what they did in the last minute.”

Klopp said there was complacency that set in after the restart. “It was absolutely OK that we are confident after that first half,” he added. “We were in two situations obviously too late in the second half — not only Alberto, the whole formation was too late in this situation.

“That’s obvious what we did. The real problem is that we stopped playing football. We had to close the game.

“3-0 is a wonderful result. There’s nothing bad to say at half-time. But you have to stay in the game because 50 minutes is a long time — you can score 10 times if you want.

“Our main mistake was that we didn’t play football anymore. We wanted to control it, but we got too passive and a little bit too deep, so they had their situations. They fought back and that’s a big credit to them. We had to do it different.”

–IANS
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