Diogo Jota and Darwin Nuñez received high praise from Jürgen Klopp, their manager at Liverpool, for the way they handled themselves in the defeat of Burnley on Boxing Day.
Liverpool are top of the Premier League pending the outcome of Arsenal’s meeting with West Ham United on 29 December. To achieve that, they had to visit Turf Moor and score two goals which came at the earliest and latest moments of a game where they were threatened constantly by a Burnley side that is slowly finding form.
The goalscorers, Nuñez and Jota, had not been on the same scoresheet for Liverpool since they last scored in the same game in October, the Premier League 2023/24 matchday 10 fixture against Nottingham Forest in which they ran out 3 – 0 winners.
It was Nuñez’s fourth Premier League goal of the season and Jota’s fifth of the season. It was a more impressive feat for Jota, who was only returning to the side after a muscle injury that kept him on the sidelines for most of their December schedule.
Klopp, who has radiated positivity throughout the season, praised the overall performance of the team before showering special praise on both players for their role in taking the Reds to the top of the Premier League table.
“You never know exactly what you can expect with the fourth game in 10 days”, Klopp began. “It was really intense. Whatever the outside world thinks, it is really intense – and coming here and playing the game we played is absolutely exceptional.”
“It’s exceptional as well that we didn’t score more goals… actually, we did but for different reasons they took them away. So, we had to wait long and obviously for a long time we caused Burnley so many problems, we played a super game.”
“As the last game in a really busy period you cannot really expect that but we did.”
“In the end we deserved to win the game and it was two perfect goalscorers, I would say, with Darwin and then Diogo.”
“We sneaked Diogo in somehow on the squad list because he trained only twice and the medical department wanted to give him extra training and I said he can have that in Burnley. He had that tonight and now he can train [on Thursday] properly and then he will be ready for Newcastle, which is really helpful. Two-nil, no injuries, all good.”
