The victory helped Liverpool move past Stoke City into the eighth spot. They are now only behind Southampton on goal difference. Given the form of teams like West Ham and Southampton in recent weeks, there is a real possibility of Liverpool finishing in the top six places. This would be seen as a reasonable return from manager Jurgen Klopp, who came to the club midway through the campaign. Further, their successes in the Europa League only bodes well for the German.
Klopp saw his team get a 5-4 aggregate win over Borussia Dortmund – in one of the finest European ties involving Liverpool – to reach the semi-final of the Europa League. They have been paired alongside Villarreal in the semifinals. Liverpool are now favourites to get into the final of the competition. Winning it will not only be a great achievement, but it would also help them directly qualify for next season’s Champions League. This has been the objective of the club for quite a while, but former manager Brendan Rodgers only managed to reach the stage once in his Liverpool career.
Sevilla and Shakhtar Donetsk will be involved in the other semi-final. Before the Europa League resumes, Liverpool have games against Everton and Newcastle.”Because it was nearly a completely new team it was absolutely no problem, we were focused only on this game. We spoke a bit about it on Thursday, but I told the boys that before the game it was a nice night on Thursday but if we’d played with the same team we would have had no chance today, absolutely no chance.This is the team that had a chance, if we played our best of course, so really in the preparation for this game we were not [focused] on Thursday anymore,” said Klopp.