Wolves‘ manager has claimed that their cup tie against Liverpool is now “the most important game” of their season, but thinks the Reds will be “better and quicker.”
Liverpool’s Premier League defeat at Molineux was disappointing for several reasons, one being the fact that eyes were already clearly on Friday’s cup tie for the hosts.
The home crowd weren’t particularly enthused before the match and coach Rob Edwards rested the side’s striker, Tolu Arokodare.
Despite that, Liverpool were unable to build the intensity to break Wolves down and ended up losing 2-1. Now, they are looking to regain some respectability but will come up against a side with a spring in their step.
Edwards said: “We made some changes, but that was because of knowing what was coming up, but also we felt it was the right way to try and win the game on Tuesday night. We did that for both those reasons and it’s hard for me to prioritise either game.
“We’re really valuing this game tomorrow and this game tomorrow is now the most important game of our season, but Tuesday night was the most important game of our season at that moment.
“It was really difficult for me to not value a game against Liverpool in the Premier League, so it was about trying to pick the right team to win a game of football, and knowing that we’ve got to be really good.
“We might have to ride our luck a little bit, and maybe things go our way for what happened to happen and now we’re in a good spot now, apart from Andre suspended, where everyone’s fit and available for tomorrow night.”
With Andre out due to an accumulation of bookings, Edwards will likely shuffle his pack, bringing in Arokodare up front, Jean-Ricner Bellegarde in midfield and Yerson Mosquera in defence.
With the Reds returning to Molineux just 72 hours after their league loss, this will be only the seventh time ever that Liverpool have played the same team away from home two games running in a single season.
“It’s the same team, but we will redo it because we always go through it,” Edwards noted when speaking about the challenge of playing Liverpool twice in four days.
“We’ll all always look at areas that we didn’t get right the other night, areas we need to improve, areas where we think they’ll try and exploit, so there’s always bits that we can brush up on. We need to be better than we were the other night to try and get something from the game because we expect them to be better.
“Reflecting and watching the game back and what we’ve been able to say with the boys, they’re a brilliant team and they’ve got great players. They might make one or two changes, but I don’t anticipate loads of change tactically, because it could still cause us problems what they do.
“But I think they’ll look to try and do things better and quicker, and we’ve got to be ready for that. There was actually a lot of good stuff in the first half without us then carrying enough threat, and we were actually pretty good without the ball and there was some really good moments with it as well.
“But once we actually broke a line or got behind their midfield, we needed to be a bit better. The game then started opening up a little bit more in the latter stages and we looked a bit of a threat, but I thought the impact of the lads coming on was really good.”
Source:
www.thisisanfield.com