Klopp speaks ahead of Liverpool vs West Brom

With the arrival of West Brom on Merseyside this weekend Liverpool will again look to gain some ground on Premier League rivals, with a number of teams around them dropping points this afternoon.

The Reds will welcome Philippe Coutinho back into the fold, after making a brief cameo on Thursday in the Europa League and, with captain Jordan Henderson also back to full-fitness, will have a number of options to choose from to counter the West Brom threat.

And speaking ahead of the match on Sunday, Jurgen Klopp believes he knows how the away side can be nullified. He said (via Liverpoolfc.com): “They are a physically strong team, a lot of tall players, they like set plays, they like fighting for second balls.

“They don’t do too much build-up play, so it’s intensive. They defend pretty deep, pretty hard.

“They want set plays in offence, not just corners but free-kicks, they want all this stuff to bring their quality through and that’s what I think everybody knew before I came here.

“It’s how Tony Pulis teams like to play and it’s quite successful, so why should he change? That’s hard work for us.”

There is no doubting that Pulis is on of the more wily operators in the Premier League and is a manager that has shown, time and again, that he is more than capable of pulling off the odd shock.

Pulis’ side are currently in decent form too, with draws against West Ham and Spurs following a surprising win over Arsenal a few weeks ago and Klopp will have to be wary that his side don’t suffer the same fate of underestimating West Brom.

On the subject of West Brom’s penchant for set plays and their aerial threat, Klopp commented: “We should sit on [each other’s] shoulders, try to get a little bit taller, things like this.

“It was not the biggest issue in the last games but of course most of the goals we [conceded] in the last few weeks were set plays, that’s true.

“We have to be concentrated. How we defend set plays is okay, it could always be better, but we have to be very, very concentrated in these situations.

“The best thing would be to avoid most of them. Of course you can’t avoid all of them, but we don’t have to make silly fouls wherever on the pitch because I think they take each one [as an attacking] set play with a lot of bodies in the box and so on. It’s a challenge.”