Barcelona midfielder, Ivan Rakitic has revealed their gameplan against Liverpool in the first leg of their Champions League semi final clash on Wednesday.
The Croat said his side knows exactly what to expect from Jurgen Klopp’s men.
Liverpool have scored 18 goals in their last six games, including a 6-1 aggregate thrashing of Porto in the quarter-final ahead of their trip to Camp Nou.
Rakitic had played against Klopp’s teams during his time playing for Schalke in the German Bundesliga.
And the midfielder admits Barcelona cannot allow the Liverpool forward line to start wreaking havoc.
Talking about Klopp, Rakitic told Echo, “I really, really respect him as a coach.
“I loved playing against his teams.
“He has always had really organised, really tight teams. You can see they are perfect in every detail.
“He has made his teams improve. You can clearly see what he’s doing and the way it works.
“It’s going to be complicated to defend against them. They have really good players up front, so we will have to do everything together.
“We need to stop them early, we shouldn’t let them run at our spaces, so we have to take the pace of the game into our hands and keep them away from our goal.
“Every team has a different style of play. We can’t really compared what they do every week in England with what we do in our league.
“They are a really well organised team, and we know what they are going to try to play – we don’t need to explain now how Salah and company play. Everybody knows that quite well.
“Virgil van Dijk is one of the best central defenders in the world and we know Liverpool’s defence is very strong and they don’t leave many spaces.
“We want to cause them more trouble tomorrow than they’ve had in previous games this season.
“We have to prepare our game and have confidence in our chances. We are playing against one of the best teams in Europe, but I’d rather talk about us showing the way we play and try to make them think of how they can compare with us, rather than the other way around.”
Liverpool have never been eliminated from European competition by Barcelona with the Reds unbeaten in four trips to Camp Nou and the only English team to win there.
And Rakitic added, “The most important thing is we play our match like we always do. It will be very important to score and go out there (to Anfield) with a clean sheet.
“We’re going to play with plenty of confidence and try to keep our heads clear. They can hurt us, of course. We know we will have to be at 100% to beat Liverpool. We have to be at our best level if we want to do that.
“We will go out there to try and score but we mustn’t lose our heads. We have to be very tight and play very tight in the same way we have in the last few weeks.
“The perfect scenario is to score as many goals as possible and not allow danger at the back and keep a clean sheet.”
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