Jürgen Klopp spoke of his satisfaction after Liverpool came through a testing afternoon at Bramall Lane to beat Sheffield United 1-0.
When asked whether it was more important to grind out a 1-0 win than win 8-0, he says: "It is more important for sure: eight times 1-0 is more important than one time 8-0, let’s say it like this… but unfortunately they [Manchester City] don’t win only one game 8-0 and we all know that.
"If you give me the guarantee for it, I would take the next eight games [as 1-0 wins] but it is difficult. We are very critical of ourselves, but it is not the moment for being critical - you just have to respect the effort we put in because that was exactly what we had to do. We fought.
"As I said before the game, is it allowed that Sheffield United fight more than us? No. And they didn’t. Did they run more? No. That was important and then if you do that, then you can have the chance to deserve the three points and that’s what we did.
"Very often around goals, you can have a little bit of luck - but this time it looks like we needed extremely much luck because of that situation. I am completely fine with it. I know that we - and Chris [Wilder] is right - we can play better.
"I don’t think we had an ‘off day’ because today it was much more important that we are really ready to fight than ready to play our best football because your best football you play in moments, but fighting you do for the whole 95 minutes. That’s what we did and that’s how we deserved it."