Jurgen Klopp addresses 'massive learning curve' after LASK win

Jurgen Klopp insisted Liverpool will not 'fly through' the Europa League despite kicking off their campaign with a win on Thursday.

The Reds beat LASK in gameweek one, despite going a goal down in the first half in Austria.

LASK's Florian Flecker rifled home from the edge of the 18-yard box to give the hosts a surprise lead early, but Klopp's side battled back after the break, with goals coming through Darwin Nuñez, Luis Diaz and Mohamed Salah, for an ultimately comfortable victory.

As the team with the highest UEFA co-efficient in the group stages, Liverpool are the tournament favourites, with many predicting that the Reds will coast into the knockouts.

However, speaking after the match, Klopp was quick to dismiss the idea that Liverpool will find the Europa League easy going.

"I know how the world is and I know that people expect us to fly through this competition. It will not happen. It will not happen in the group stage, it will not happen in the knockout stage," he said, via Liverpoolfc.com.

"We have to dig in, which we did. It was a massive learning curve tonight, the opponent suffered much less from the pitch than we did. We had to get used to it. So we can learn so much.

"If we would have used Ben Doak a little more often, given him the ball I think he would have got the ball more times on the touchline and passed the ball inside or whatever. Stefan found a way into the game after a difficult start, but we caused the problems obviously with the timing of our passes. Ryan [Gravenberch] played a super game in really difficult circumstances and was really decisive for us. Ibou [Konate] could get 80 minutes I think, Stefan could get minutes. So there were so many positives and I am cheeky enough to be really happy about that game."

READ MORE: 4 talking points from Liverpool's 3-1 win over LASK

Klopp also played down becoming the first Liverpool manager to record 50 wins in Europe, insisting he is focussed on qualification.

He added: "Let me say it like this, if I have still 50 after the group stage then I’m still the most successful Liverpool manager [in this regard] and everybody will hate the fact!

"[It’s] nice. We played quite a lot of games in Europe. It’s good that we won that many, we qualified frequently for finals so of course we should have won games. It’s great but probably it’s because in European competition there are just much more games than in the past. I’m pretty sure that’s it."