Watford 3 Liverpool 0: ‘It is the most disappointing day of my life at the club,' says Reds manager Jurgen Klopp

Jürgen Klopp never wants his Liverpool team to play as badly again as they did in losing at Watford yesterday. The manager was clearly disappointed with how his players failed to recover from conceding an early goal, saying that they “lost their mind”, and condemning the “big space” between their pre-match hopes and how they performed.

Asked if it was the worst Liverpool had played during his tenure so far, Klopp said he never wanted his team to drop to this level again. “I would say hopefully it is the most disappointing moment in my whole Liverpool FC life, from now,” Klopp said.

“We don’t feel good today, of course, because we came here to do something really different to what you saw,” he said. “There was a big space between what we wanted to do and what you saw. That is what we have to fill before the next game against Leicester.”

Liverpool never got over Watford’s opening goal, when Miguel Britos appeared to kick the ball out of Adam Bogdan’s hands, and Klopp criticised their failure to react to adversity. “Mistakes, fouls, refs, whatever, can happen,” Klopp said. “That’s football. The reaction has to be better. We lost our mind after the first goal, we lost our compact formation after the first goal. We didn’t play easy [simple], as we should have done. The pitch is not the best one but it’s possible to play football if you play easy football.”

This was the third Premier League defeat of Klopp’s time in charge of Liverpool since he took over in October, and Klopp admitted he was still trying to help his team find some consistency. “After Southampton [6-1 win], everybody thought ‘wow’, and after Man City [4-1 win]. But that was one part of what we can do, one side. Now we saw completely the other side. Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle. We have to work so that it’s more on the Man City, Southampton, Chelsea performances.

“I know how strong this team can be. It’s my job to help them so they can show it much more often than we have. The easy games, everybody wins. The difficult games, we have to win much more often than we have until now.”

Quique Sanchez Flores was delighted with Watford’s fourth consecutive league win. “I am really pleased with the desire the whole team showed,” he said. “I have had the feeling since the first day that this group of players has a big soul, that we can be competitive.”

Watford are now just one point behind Manchester United, but the manager urged them not to lose sight of their goal of survival in their first year back in the Premier League. “It would be a very big mistake [to change targets],” Sanchez Flores said. “We have to stick to the ideas of the club, which are very clever, very clear. We are just thinking about growing Watford. We need to establish ourselves in the Premier League, this is what the fans need, and Watford needs. To lose perspective would be a very, very bad thing for us.”