Coach Jurgen Klopp felt Liverpool deserved to progress to the Champions League last eight as they held off Inter Milan with a 2-1 victory on aggregate on Tuesday.
Lautaro Martinez's stunning strike briefly gave Inter hope of a famous comeback, but after Alexis Sanchez was sent off Liverpool sealed their passage to the last eight.
"Pete Krawietz always says the art of football is to lose the right games. I still hate it but if there was any kind of game we could have afforded to lose, it was tonight because the main target obviously of this competition is to get through," Klopp said in the post-match press conference.
"But it's not that I'm here like over the moon. I'm really happy that we went through because obviously when we saw the draw in the first place it was like, 'OK, that's a tough one.' So we went through and I think over the two legs we deserved it. That's fine. That we had some problems in the game tonight was [for] different reasons, one is the quality of the opponent - they are a really good football team," he added.
The onus was firmly on Inter after their 2-0 defeat in the first leg and, just for a moment midway through the second half, a famous Anfield comeback of another hue looked on the cards. Lautaro Martinez's stunning strike halved the deficit for the ascendant visitors.
Hope did not spring eternal, though. It barely lasted a minute. A second yellow card for Alexis Sanchez left Inter down to ten, an uphill task became a mountainous one. Jurgen Klopp brought on his wise old heads in midfield and Liverpool played the game out with a degree of comfort.
"When I think about the game, I didn't like our counter-press, I don't think we won any kind of ball back in the first 20 minutes. You have to be kind of expansive when you open up when you are in possession, but when you lose the ball - and we lost the ball obviously in strange moments - then you have to chase the situation. And that was not exactly how I wanted it. But in the end, we have to respect the quality of the opponent. We do that. How I said, it's a big if - we didn't score - but if we would have used our chances from set-pieces, from other situations, it was then a bit slapstick how we missed the chances, in the end, we still could have won the game," the German pointed.
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