Jurgen Klopp was left impressed with Alexis Mac Allister’s performance in the no.6 role during Liverpool’s 3-1 win over SV Darmstadt 98 on Monday night.
The 24-year-old was winning the ball and disrupting the opposition’s attacks as the Reds rounded off their pre-season preparations in style.
Mac Allister lasted for 75 minutes at Deepdale Stadium in a midfield which also featured Dominik Szoboszlai and Cody Gakpo before he was replaced by academy graduate Jarell Amorin Quansah.
“He’s a top-class player; on the ball [and] without the ball. We had our moments where we were a bit too open, that’s clear, but we are not used to it,” Klopp told Liverpoolfc.com.
“That’s why I said we had to work on it. We will do that. We have to try it and test a couple of different things. Yes, in a compact formation, Alexis can play there, definitely. If he’s there alone, should he play there? No. But now he showed just how good a footballer he is and how good he understands the game because he played here now [for] the first time for us at least and he did really well.
The German added: “We had pretty much all the situations already. When you win the last pre-season game five or six-nil and everything clicks and you think, ‘Oh my god…’ but that was obviously not the case.
“We did a lot of good stuff, obviously, could have scored many more goals. We conceded again one which we shouldn’t concede, but it’s an obvious mistake which we spoke already about. But that’s how it is with mistakes, if you do it once, you talk about it, you work on it [but] that doesn’t mean you sort it immediately.
The situation is clear, the diagonal protection is not there. We cannot avoid each pass in behind our line, we just have to make sure that we are then in better positions.
“Besides that, we scored two goals after set-pieces, which is important. We could have scored one from a high-press situation, which is good as well and besides that we played a lot of good stuff without finishing the situations off.
“With the physical state I am really happy, we looked really fresh, looked really good – now, in the next five or six days, we have to find a formation for the Chelsea game, not for the whole season, and then we go from there. All OK, nobody got injured, so that’s the most important thing. We came through so far OK and that’s good.”
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