Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp has revealed that his team won't change the way they have been playing against Real Madrid despite the rich history of their opponents in thr competition.Real are defending Champions and have won the Champions League twice in succession under Zinedine Zidane and are looking to make it three times in a row at Kyiv on Saturday, 26 May.
After spending the majority of this week amid the sunshine of Marbella for a training camp, Klopp and his team returned to Merseyside on Saturday night to begin the next stage of their preparations. The Merseyside club have had an extra week of rest before the final, with Real playing their final game of the season this weekend.
The task at hand is to stop Cristiano Ronaldo, who has scored 42 goals in all competitions this season and is a seasoned veteran in Europe. However, Liverpool have their own talisman in the form of Mohamed Salah, who has 44 goals in the entire campaign.
The two players are likely to be front-runners in the race to win the Ballon d'Or later this year but Liverpool boss Klopp does not believe there is any personal rivalry between the two. The Reds are not going to go out of their game plan to tackle Real and will continue playing the expansive football, which saw them beat Roma 7-6 on aggregate in the semi-finals.
"If I was to ask the boys, 'What do you want to do in this game?' they would say, 'What we always did'. I am pretty sure that would be the answer," explained Klopp to the Liverpool website.
"In football you always have to try to create a plan to deny the qualities of an opponent, but you also have to bring through your own qualities. If we would only think about trying to deny their qualities, that would be quite difficult.
"It's not that we go there, run like crazy and have no clue how to defend, it won't be like that. But we will play our football and hopefully at the highest level."
Real's dominance of Europe's elite club competition has the La Liga outfit on the threshold of an achievement not seen since the 1970s. Bayern Munich were the last team to win the tournament three times in a row, from 1974 to 1976. Klopp was quick to point that out and stated that he had massive respect for the La Liga outfit.
"There have been three dominant clubs in the last few years – Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern," Klopp added. "We face one of them in the final so who should be the favourite? I have no problem with the situation. It's not that I want to be the underdog, I don't feel like an underdog.
"But, yes, they are favourites, they know everything, they could write the script for the final because they have experienced it four times in the last five years. We can't but no problem with that. We want to play and win a football game.
"In the end it will be a test: what's bigger, the desire to win a third one in a row or the desire to win the first one for some years? "Real have almost exactly the same line-up from winning it before. A lot of their players won the last two finals and that's really rare.
"This has been the Real Madrid Champions League generation. They will want to do it again. It would be big, 100 per cent. If we did it, it would be big too."
