Jurgen Klopp has admitted it was difficult to prepare for Liverpool's second leg Champions League clash with Atletico Madrid as the coronavirus pandemic was taking hold of the Spanish capital.
The Reds had lost the first leg tie 1-0 but there were doubts as to whether the match at Anfield would go ahead with other games in Europe cancelled or taking place behind closed doors.
Madrid was already beginning to shutdown before the fixture and all La Liga had already said that games could no longer go ahead with supporters in stadiums.
But thousands of fans were able to travel to Merseyside with a crowd of over 50,000 people watching on.
Klopp said it was strange for the team to prepare for the game amid the uncertainty and events unfolding in their opponents country.
'It is two weeks ago, but it feels like it is ages ago that we played Atletico and Thursday was a day off,' he told Liverpool's official website.
'I remember, we all knew about the situation with coronavirus around the world but we were still ‘in our tunnel’, if you want, and until then it didn’t really arrive into our mind in England.
'We played the Bournemouth game on Saturday, we won it, then Sunday City lost, so the information for us was ‘two wins to go’. But then on Monday morning, I woke up and heard about the situation in Madrid, that they would close the schools and universities from Wednesday, so it was really strange to prepare for that game, to be honest.
'I usually don’t struggle with things around me, I can build barriers right and left when I prepare for a game, but in that moment it was really difficult.
'Wednesday we had the game, I loved the game, I loved what I saw from the boys, it was a really, really good performance other than the result – we didn’t score enough, we conceded too many, that’s all clear, but between these two main pieces of information it was a brilliant game! Thursday [we were] off and then Friday when we arrived it was already clear this is not a session.
'Yes, we trained, but it was more of a meeting. We had a lot of things to talk about, a lot of things to think about, things I never thought before in my life about.
'Nobody knew exactly – and nobody knows exactly – how it will go on, so the only way we could do it was to organise it as good as possible for the boys and make sure everything is sorted as much as we can sort it in our little space, in the little area where we are responsible, really.
'That’s what we did in a very short time, then we sent the boys home, went home ourselves and here we are still.'
The Liverpool manager also said he has been keeping an eye on his players in the team's whatsapp group and their social media posts.
Both James Milner and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain have kept fans entertained with the former pretending to cut the grass with a pair of scissors and the latter posting a dance video.
'I didn’t cut the grass but I tried the dance of Ox! Not as bad as you probably think!' he joked.
'It’s very important in these times that we all show we take this situation seriously, but we are human beings.
'You have to keep your own mood up and you have to keep the mood up for other people. If the boys do anything on Instagram, as long as it’s in a legal frame I’m overly happy about it – it just shows they are still cheeky and all that stuff. I like it, I like it a lot. I like the line-ups they do. All these things are really funny. It’s good.'