• Wenger: ‘The thinking was that we had to be more direct’ • Jürgen Klopp delighted win over Arsenal puts Liverpool back in top four

Arsène Wenger claimed the decision to leave Alexis Sánchez out of his starting lineup at Anfield was in order to facilitate a more direct approach, before accepting the gamble did not work.

“The thinking was that we had to go more direct, to use players who are strong in the air,” the Arsenal manager explained. “I have no regrets, except that we lost the game. I don’t deny Alexis Sánchez is a good player, I bought him, and it was not an easy decision to leave him out, but I have to stand by it. I am strong enough and lucid enough to analyse the impact.”

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The impact was that Arsenal were poor in the first half and improved when Sánchez came on. “We lacked pace in the first half, we were not at the races,” Wenger admitted. When it was pointed out to him that Arsenal had not been very direct either, creating no chances before half-time, Wenger admitted his strategy had backfired.

“We did try to go direct, by which I mean I wanted the goalkeeper to kick it straight to the strikers,” he said.

“But you are right, we didn’t make any chances, and we didn’t make enough of our corners.”

Against all expectations Wenger appears to be turning into a version of Sam Allardyce, though he sounded more like his usual self when complaining that some refereeing decisions had gone against his side, particularly when Emre Can escaped a second yellow for bringing down substitute Theo Walcott in the second half.

“We were unlucky with some decisions in the second half,” Wenger said. “I did not seek explanations from the referee because explanations will not change the result.”

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Jürgen Klopp was delighted with the result and a move back into the Premier League top four after what he described as one of his worst weeks as a football manager. “I have been 17 years a manager, and trying to get over the defeat at Leicester led to one of the worst training experiences in my life,” Klopp said. “We had a bad defeat, so many bad performances, and there were a few hard words at the training ground, but I said to the boys that at some point we had to finish the Leicester game, put it behind us and start to go again, and hopefully we have done that with this win.

“We were spot-on from the first second of the game and that was pleasing. We were much better than Arsenal in the first half and we could have scored more. I don’t like the fact that inconsistency seems to be part of the deal at the moment, but usually with that you lose games against the bigger teams. We seem to have chosen another way.”