From Jurgen Klopp, there was an apology to Liverpool’s stunned, and suffering, fanbase.
And a promise too. While he knows he can’t turn round such a rapid decline in his team’s form overnight, he does still believe it is possible to resurrect something tangible from their season. Already, the side which hounded Manchester City all the way in the title race last season - and got so close to an historic quadruple - have all but conceded the Premier League crown just eight games into the new campaign.
Diogo Jota perhaps put it most succinctly, when he conceded: “We know how difficult it will be - It doesn’t seem viable at the moment.” Yet if the league is already over, then Europe still beckons, and Wednesday night’s trip to Glasgow to meet Rangers offers not only the chance for redemption, but also an opportunity to take a giant stride into the knockout stage of the competition.
A win at Ibrox, combined with defeat for Ajax against a Napoli team who beat them 6-1 less than a week ago, would mean they require only a single point from their final two games.
And this is where Klopp’s fighting spirit comes in. He knows his team isn’t firing, he knows there were painfully evident problems in the dispiriting defeat at Arsenal, and he knows the goals they have continued to concede in the same, painful manner, means there is no quick fix.
But he believes it is possible to turn this bad start around, and give fans some hope, in Europe at least. “This is a tough situation but it is also a challenge,” he said with some defiance.
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“It is a challenge we must face. We always face challenges but we go for it. I am sorry to all our people who expected that after last season we go again and fly again and compete for everything. And now it is not the case.
“But the team I saw today in training I liked a lot. So let's give it a go. That is what we did against Arsenal, we fought, really hard, and that is what we will do [against Rangers], because we have to do it.”
Rangers will present another daunting challenge, in the bear-pit atmosphere of Ibrox, that Klopp knows will not be easy. But he is adamant things are not quite as gloomy as the response following the defeat at Arsenal suggested.
In the immediate aftermath of that game, with three of his stars in Luis Diaz, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Joel Matip all injured, he admitted he was down himself.
But he suggested: "If you sleep on a problem, sometimes you realise life goes on. No, look, it's like this, you watch a game back and I was pretty sure it wasn't a penalty, and we should have had a penalty.
“Even the tv ref Dermot Gallagher said the referee got it wrong - and we also found afterwards that the first goal of Arsenal was pretty likely offside, but we cannot see because the cameras were not there.
“I’m not trying to reopen it, but I think if we just got the right decisions, then we can judge the game. If we win that game then for the outside world, we would be completely sorted.
“Of course we know it’s not like that. But we also know it wasn’t easy to judge that game because of the decisions, and we know we showed fight. Which we will show again.”
Klopp also had some good news, with Alexander-Arnold and Matip likely to be back in a fortnight, and even Diaz potentially back in six weeks.
