Liverpool looking to regain intensity that made them team ‘nobody wanted to play’

It may only be a friendly, but for Liverpool’s players, the match against Olympique Lyonnais at Al-Nasr’s Maktoum Stadium on Sunday night is one more step on the road to rediscovering the consistency that had deserted them in the early half of the season.

Liverpool are in Dubai on a training camp, and Jurgen Klopp’s assistant Pep Lijnders wants the players to retain the intensity that made them the team “nobody wants to play again.

“You always search for consistency in the team. In the season you search for stability. The only way to be intense is that you can play every several days, not with the same 11, but with the core group,” he said, ahead of the first Dubai Super Cup outing against the French side. The second game, against A.C. Milan, will take place on Dec. 16.

“The injuries didn’t help, of course. Going behind in many games early — that didn’t help as well,” said Lijnders. “We all know that the team is built on confidence. And the player with confidence or without confidence, or team with confidence or without confidence, is not the same. The moments where we had to fight to come back into the game, and change the result around, that asks for a different type of game.

“We know other teams adapt. Teams know to sit deep against us, try to exploit our high line or the counter attack. And when it’s 1-0 for the opposition team, it makes it of course much easier to execute that type of game plan. We try to commit more bodies, players try to resolve more often something individually instead of collectively. And that’s a little bit of the story of the first part (of the season).

“Sometimes you need to take two steps back, to see the truth and feel how it is not to win as many games,” said Lijnders at a signing