Jurgen Klopp has justified his decision of fielding a young side against Plymouth in the FA Cup replay. Lucas Leiva scored his first goal for the Reds in the six years as they defeated Plymouth.
Klopp admitted that his youngsters had their fears of being embarrassed by Plymouth. Klopp fielded an almost new starting eleven. Liverpool have a very busy schedule ahead and keeping that in mind, Klopp decided to rest most of the first team players.
The scoreline would have been different had Divock Origi not missed a penalty. The Reds will now face Wolves in the next round.
Klopp said, “It was tough.
“We had a lot of young players today and one of the challenges they had was playing live on television against a fourth division team and everyone thinks you are three-to-four classes better, and then not feeling embarrassment when you lose a challenge or something. I really saw it in the first half when it started happening to them.
“At half‑time we could fix this a little bit, so we were kind of back in the race, controlled the game. But they [Plymouth] did really well. They had one or two chances, two or three more difficult situations, but I heard the biggest chance was offside. We had more chances and the penalty, so two or three-nil would have been completely OK and the perfect result. But 1-0 is also good.”
