LIVERPOOL: Liverpool manager Juergen Klopp says his team can compensate for their lack of Champions League final experience by showing greater desire and work-rate than Real Madrid in Saturday’s clash in Kiev.

Real Madrid are looking to win their fourth Champions League final in five years while Liverpool are in their first final in the competition since 2007.

“They are more experienced. That is a fact. If there is an experience market, they should sell it because then they would be even more rich than they are already,” Klopp said.

“Experience is very important in life but not the only important thing in life and especially in football.

“It is an advantage to be more experienced but you can level it with desire, with readiness, attitude work rate and that is what I love in football. We have our own experience. We have not that positive experience that we won the last two finals or something but we made our own experience,” he said.

Klopp’s men started their Champions League campaign in a playoff against Hoffenheim just to make the group stages back in August.

Now, after plundering 46 goals in 14 games, Liverpool have made it back to the Champions League final.

“I don’t want to talk about confidence, but we feel good and think we deserve to be where we are because the boys really showed up in all the different games,” said Klopp. “It was a very exciting journey so far and now we want to bring it to the best possible end.”

The German suggested Liverpool will, however, have to raise their game to a new level to defeat Zinedine Zidane’s side.

“Lets go there and try to perform on a level which maybe people would say it is not possible for us — but it is possible,” he said.

“And that is exactly what we should do. We did all the things we need for this game plenty of times already in the Champions League campaign and now we have to do it again, thats it, against a really strong team,” he said.

Liverpool will be back in the Champions League next season no matter the outcome in the Ukranian capital as they held on to finish fourth in the Premier League despite a late-season blip in form as the physical toil of their European exertions showed.

Klopp took his squad on a warm weather training camp in Marbella last week.

And he believes a two-week break between their 4-0 thrashing of Brighton & Hove Albion to ensure a top-four finish and the final is the perfect preparation to ensure Liverpool’s high-energy style can be fully utilised on Saturday.

“It’s a very good moment for the club, for us, for the boys because we have finished the season in the best way we could,” he added.

“It felt really good and then having the time to prepare the game is really good. We could do a lot of things and didn’t have to rush it or compress it into two or three sessions. It was good recovery time.”

Published in Dawn, May 22nd, 2018