Jurgen Klopp has angrily snapped back at questions surrounding Jordan Henderson's place in his Liverpool team.
Henderson has played just 33 minutes of the Reds' last two Premier League games, neither of which they won. In fact, the Liverpool skipper has started just 10 of their 20 top-flight matches this season, with Klopp increasingly turning to other options.
But with their captain on the bench, the Reds have struggled, winning just three games when he has not started. That poor run of form has seen Klopp come under fire ahead of Monday's Merseyside Derby, but the German has now angrily hit back.
“I don’t understand why we are talking about one player, I mean it. Everybody knows how much I respect him. I don’t like saying this but it’s true, you are not able to deal with these kinds of things," he fumed.
"One player becomes the subject, ‘Henderson is this, Henderson is that’, Hendo is not our problem. Never was and never will be. When he is fit and in good shape he played 98 per cent of the games we had.
"He played all these games because he’s a very, very, very important player for us. There’s nothing…I understand that you have to think about subjects, but I cannot answer this question. Yes he’s important and how much did we miss him, a lot.”
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Klopp insisted that Liverpool's problems this season have not just been down the absence of Henderson. Instead, he pointed to wider issues with his team, with the Reds' hopes of finishing in the European qualification spots fading.
“It’s not just him, that’s the key. If we missed it from Hendo but not from the others, we wouldn’t miss it that much. This is a team story and if you want a manager story [that’s OK] but nothing else," Klopp added.
"But not individual players or members of staff, that story doesn’t work. Definitely not. In our best periods, it's easy to have a press conference because you ask about players scoring, we have a laugh and it's nice.
"Some of you make massive things of what I say and it is not my intention. It's difficult to talk all the time about [poor form]. I can explain absolutely everything, but not to you [journalists]. People can write what they want.
"That's the problem, I can't explain everything to you. I explain it to the boys and we go from there. We hope for a better result and a much easier press conference."
