Jurgen Klopp has urged Sadio Mane not to respond to heavy-handed opponents and instead ‘pay them back with football’.
The Liverpool manager recently highlighted the preferential treatment that his forward received in his side’s recent games with Atletico Madrid and Arsenal.
He also came to blows with Mikel Arteta in the latter fixture after his opposite number remonstrated for Mane to be booked for a foul on Takehiro Tomiyasu.
Ahead of Saturday’s visit of Southampton, Klopp revealed he had held talks with the Senegal international about not rising to such gamesmanship tactics.
He said: “It has been a thing for much longer.
“Even when it was not obvious from the outside, you can see it in games that they got for him and want to wind him up. But it’s two different things.
“But it is two different things. One is to make Sadio really aggressive during the game.
“We saw that against Flamengo in the Club World Cup final.
“Rafinha wanted to go for him after he caused them some problems when we played Bayern in the Champions League. It was obvious from the first second when he went in really hard.
“But Sadio’s now of an age where he’s much better at [handling] that.
“He’s not as emotional anymore. We all need our emotions obviously and sometimes we control them better and sometimes less.
“Yes, we had these talks but it had nothing to do with the situation against Arsenal. It is pretty much a completely normal challenge.
“With Real Madrid it was obvious and against Atletico, it was pretty much obvious; they had a red card and directly after a player went down and made more [of it] just to make sure they get our player sent off or a yellow card.
“That is what I was talking about. The headline [from their discussions] is: ‘We pay back with football.
“Whatever we do, we pay them back with football.”
Mane heads into a latest meeting with his former employers in prolific form after scoring in his last four Premier League appearances at Anfield this term.
And Klopp believes both the 29-year-old and Mohamed Salah’s purple patch are attributable to an extended summer break and a full pre-season schedule.
“He’s a very confident person and we all felt it on the first day of pre-season, after a proper break, he was completely 100% there,” added the German.
“If he will be lucky with injuries, it could be a really good season for him because of the quality he has and that’s what he shows now.
“I cannot refer often enough about how important it would be for these kind of players that they have a proper break.
“I could speak about that for the next 20 years and the authorities will not change things.
“But this year Mo and Sadio had a proper break and so far we are getting the benefit of that.”