I genuinely feel that Slot’s approach to player and squad management left us in a bad position it’s going to take time and considerable expense to recover from.
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Might be where time comes into play. In anycase it turned out he was the wrong person.
In anycase the main point was over animosity.
Why should there be any?
This probably won’t go down well, but I think that even the title win was somewhat circumstantial. Not that we didn’t deserve it, or that we weren’t the best team, but in terms of Slot’s physical preparation and squad management, which have been proven to be lacking.
I very much doubt that we would have won the league if Slot hadn’t inherited a superbly fit team even if everything else had transpired in the exact same way.
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I agree with this but also Arne deserves credit for recognising that and just making a couple of minor tweaks (that Jurgen did not) for instance with Grav and not, as other coaches may have, trying to immediately imprint his style (at least until the team went out of the CL in 2025).
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So, just as a hypothetical, if you could go back to the summer of 2024, and roll the dice on a manager other than Slot, would you?
I wanted Xabi then too, so, yeah, probably.
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He was the right man to take over from Klopp.
He became the wrong person to take on the challenge of evolving the squad to the next iteration.
I’m 100% comfortable with both statements being true. Finding a manager that can deliver everything required over a number of seasons is difficult as hell. There’s isn’t many out there that can do that.
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And I very much doubt that we’d have won the league if we hadn’t appointed Slot.
I think it’s wild that people have a ‘well, yeah but so what’ attitude to winning the league title. I supported Liverpool for 30 years without seeing us win one. It’s a big deal. Maybe when we’ve won shitloads we can be blase about it.
This is right, but I think it’s more than that. 99% of managers coming in after Klopp and taking over a team that was good, but nobody pegged on winning the league, would have played down expectations, asked for time, transition season etc. Pretty much first thing Slot did when he came in was to say fuck that. This is a great collection of players and we should be winning the league. It takes some balls to come into a club like Liverpool, following a manager like Klopp, and raise expectations.
From that point, he barely foot a foot wrong all season. Tactically brilliant, used his squad well, and we didn’t see the players or him really drop off, whatever the reason for that, until the title was won.
Last summer I think between him and Hughes, they made an absolute fucking mess of the transfer window, getting rid of good squad options, and bringing in undoubted quality, but leaving the squad very thin.
That is about the sum of it for me, and everything that transpired after that stemmed from the hubris of thinking we could go into a premier league season with 17 usable outfield players, half a dozen of whom were also injury prone. All the dour football, the lack of imagination, the fatigue, the injuries begetting injuries, stems from that.
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Wouldn’t be so sure about that myself.
Rodgers brand of football was far better and he was much better with the younger lads and actually cared about developing a few.
One was extremely arrogant in front of the media, and the other was extremely dull.
Slot has a period that even trumps Hodgson, that’s a bigger stain on him than anything Rodgers left with.
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Except its not a so what attitude. It’s about balancing the pro’s and cons of his time here, even if you limit the period under consideration just to his first season then there are still red flags.
I would happily take finishing second under a manager keeping the club together and moving us forward than one winning the league but trashing the fabric of it.
He was widely criticised for poor use of his squad. Performances dropped from about February. His tactics/ marking set up failing (and decline in fitness) were a big part of that.
“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist” In Arne’s case it appears to be convincing people that his coaching wasn’t at fault…
No, it stems from poor coaching. He failed to solve issues that had plagued him since the previous February. The issues you highlight compounded that.
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Aren’t we feeling generous:
Liverpool to Top Up Arne Slot Salary for Netherlands Manager Job
This. Ultimately, it’s what makes him a failed appointment in my eyes. Maintaining high standards and competing at a high level, year in, year out is what separates the truly good ones from the also-rans.
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Alternatively, Slot didn’t thrash the fabric of the club.
If the fabric of the club was thrashed, then we would have no hope for this season.
He made mistakes and paid the price, and so did other managers in this club history.
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Do poorly enough in qualifiers and you get every other summer off as well
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Strictly speaking, I didn’t say he did - I was merely pointing out that any decision as to whether someone is the right man for the Job goes beyond whether or not they won a league title.
However, any trashing may not be visible immediately (at least to us outside) and so the impact may not be felt immediately.
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That is misstatement of what people on the other side of the argument from you are saying. It is not being blase about the title win. It is a difference of opinion of 1) how much of it was down to Slot vs the quality of the work he inherited, and 2) how much of what he brought was unique enough that an alternative appointment wouldnt have had the same success over a 2 year period given the same great inheritance, and 3) how ready to win would we have been under a different manager going into the start of our 3rd post-Klopp season?
As always, leaders are judged in large part on the campground rule - did you leave it better than you found it.
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To my mind, it’s nice to be nice. Slot won the title in his first season. Well done that man. Of course he received a good inheritance from Jurgen, but then he harnessed it into a title winning outfit. The achievement is ensconced in the record books.
Then yes, that’s obviously not the whole story. The second season was well below expectations, with the only silver lining being that we finished in the CL spots.
Lots of early adopters could see the writing on the wall, and they wanted him gone much earlier. Others waited for longer to draw their conclusion, hoping that he would turn it around. The club gave him the whole season, and I’m glad we did as winning the Premier League should come with some respect, and patience, but when the patience ran out we ended the arrangement.
Thank you Arne Slot for the title. Now Iraola is at the helm, and we can’t wait to see what he will do.
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Slot found us on 19 titles and left us on 20.
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No, I disagree. He coached that squad poorly in his second season. No arguments there. But there is a reason why a title winning coach who looked like a diamond 9months earlier suddenly looks like he doesn’t know what a football is.
He went into the season desperately understocked, and the squad he had got was full of players who couldn’t stay fit, or that he clearly didn’t trust. The compound effect of this was that as injuries started to eat into the players he had, he had no others to turn to, players got overplayed and fell by the wayside. What people describe as poor coaching and poor playing style I see as a manager desperately trying to conserve the resources at his disposal, protect players and play a hideously conservative style in a vain attempt to stop the results and the depletion getting any worse.
No Liverpool manager should be going into the old Trafford game, looking at his bench and seeing two usable players. If I have one wish for Iraola it’s that the club doesn’t convince itself he can make do with the squad he currently has. This is in a lot of ways a numbers game - you need a lot of players, and Arsenal’s success last season is based primarily on them just having loads of the bastards.
Don’t think I’m letting Slot of the hook here, cos I’ve already said he carries blame for this. Think he and Hughes believed their own hype and thought they could be smarter than the leagueo, which promptly blew up in their faces.
I want to win league titles. And needless to say, I don’t think anything is trashed.
Slot’s title came five years after Klopp’s. If we don’t win that we’re sat here wondering when the next one is coming. Is it going to be a decade? Is it going to be two? I’d be sixty by then, not knowing if I’ll see us win another.
What keeps this club together is winning league titles. The best route to success is being successful. We’ve lived through decades of relative irrelevance, and I don’t want that again.
Much like an optical illusion that two people can look at and see two different things in the same image, I agree with the situation but my take, and my big reason for being anti-Slot, is that he is incredibly culpable in this situation coming about in the first place.
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