Liverpool manager Juergen Klopp on Wednesday hailed his side’s desire not to ease up after clinching the Premier League title as two goals from Mohamed Salah kept the Reds on course for a record points tally with a 3-1 win against Brighton & Hove Albion.
The champions moved to 92 points, making three wins from their final four games enough to break Manchester City’s record of 100 points from two seasons ago.
“We are champions and it could be softening, but it is not — the boys go with everything,” Klopp said. “We now have 92 points and last season we had 97. We got five points more than this last season — that’s unbelievable, I have no idea how we did that.”
Photo: AFP
Klopp’s men were quick off the mark with two goals in the first eight minutes to end a run of five games without a goal away from home either side of the COVID-19 shutdown.
Brighton’s desire to play out from the back has been one of the hallmarks of Graham Potter’s first season in charge and the Seagulls look certain to meet their target of staying in the division with a nine-point cushion over the bottom three.
However, the hosts were twice caught out by Liverpool’s press to leave themselves too much to do, despite another promising performance.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“I saw two very good football teams tonight, both trying to play football,” Klopp said. “They had a brave formation and set up, but we had a super solution for that. Our high press was outstanding.”
Salah remained in the hunt for a third Golden Boot in as many seasons as a Liverpool player as he slotted home Naby Keita’s cross to open the scoring.
Two minutes later the Reds robbed possession again in the Brighton half and after Salah was held up, Jordan Henderson curled home a brilliant shot into the far corner for a rare goal in an inspirational season for the Liverpool captain.
However, Henderson later limped off with a knee injury that Klopp is concerned could end his season.
“We have to make scans, but we know it is not nothing, so that is already enough,” Klopp said.
Rather than letting the floodgates open, Brighton showed impressive resolve to then take the game to their illustrious visitors.
Brighton got their reward just before halftime when Leandro Trossard connected sweetly with Tariq Lamptey’s cross to halve the deficit.
Salah was clinical when he headed home Andy Robertson’s corner at the near post for his 19th Premier League goal of the season to move within three of Jamie Vardy in the race for the Golden Boot.
Elsewhere, Manchester City bounced back to form with a 5-0 rout of Newcastle United, Wolverhampton Wanderers’ Champions League aspirations stumbled again in a last-gasp 1-0 defeat against Sheffield United and West Ham United lost 1-0 against Burnley.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier