Jurgen Klopp hits back at Pep Guardiola for his comments on Sadio Mane’s ‘diving’
Liverpool News: Jurgen Klopp wasted no time in defending Sadio Mane after Pep Guardiola’s comments on the player’s ‘diving’. The Manchester City boss took a dig at Mane and claimed that the player dives.
Following Manchester City’s 2-1 win against Southampton last week, Guardiola talked about Mane and said, “Sometimes Mane’s diving, sometimes he has this talent to score incredible goals in the last minute.”
When Klopp was asked to address this comment, he responded by saying, “Do I like that he says this about one of my players? I’m not even 100 percent sure if he spoke about Sadio [Mane] or us in general. I didn’t hear Sadio’s name.”
“I don’t know how he could have known about any incident in the game so quickly after [their game against Southampton]”, added the Liverpool boss.
Despite being unsure of the comment, Klopp took the opportunity to defend his player and said, “Sadio is not a diver. There was a situation in the Aston Villa game where he got a contact and went down. Maybe it wasn’t a penalty but there was contact – it’s not like jumping over a leg and acting like he hit you.”
He then went to add, “All the other penalties were penalties because he was in that situation and stayed there. I’m 100 sure if something like this would happen for Man City, they would want to have a penalty because somebody kicked a player in the box and it’s a penalty.”
Following that, Klopp went on to stress on the fact that his upcoming match against Genk needs to be addressed before they talk about their Premier League encounter against the reigning Champions.
“I’m absolutely not in the mood to talk about Manchester City. I really want to talk about Genk or us, but not about the game on Sunday”, asserted Klopp.
