Bad luck for Arsenal: Jurgen Klopp reveals how he will beat Wenger!
Aug 13, 2016 at 12:22 PM
Jurgen Klopp has taken a swipe at Arsenal ahead of the new season.
The two Premier League powerhouses will face each other at the Emirates on Sunday.
Klopp, who succeeded Brendan Rodgers in October, guided the Reds to an eighth-placed finish last term.
But ahead of the showdown in north London, Klopp claims there is clear evidence to suggest Arsenal are a long ball team.
“I think everyone who saw the game saw the difference between this game and all the other Arsenal games,” Klopp revealed.
“But in the last few years, Arsenal had a more direct style.
“They have only good football players but at the end, they don’t use all of them in each build up or each offensive movement – it is a myth. It is definitely a plan and they want to win games.”
Speaking more specifically about the Gunners’ tactics, Klopp said: “The second ball was to Ozil, they caused us a lot of problems in this game. That was a big threat on that day.
“We knew about it because a lot of teams chose this way against us so we could have defended on this day better.
“It was not about what they did, it was about how they did it because it was the highest quality with how Giroud and Mesut Ozil, especially, on this day performed.”
For the majority of managers, the first weekend of the Premier League season is not the time when they want to be facing a clash with a major rival. Players are still not quite at their sharpest and new arrivals have yet to be fully bedded in, yet points lost will count just as much come to the end of the campaign.
For both Arsenal and Liverpool, however, that is exactly the situation they find themselves in going into their heavyweight clash at the Emirates Stadium on Sunday.
The match will mark the first meeting between two of the seven sides that start the season with realistic hopes of landing the title in the most competitive Premier League season yet.
Yet, although it is certainly not an ideal situation for either Wenger or Liverpool counterpart Jurgen Klopp, it is particularly unwelcome for the Arsenal boss. Fretting over a lack of signings and injury crises has been all-too familiar at Arsenal in recent years.