For all of the Slot Out comments, this seems more pertinent. Clearly, set-pieces is something we have been desperately struggling at.
I suppose this all depends on who he is replaced with, and whether they will be able to work with the other coaching staff.
Wait a minute…
We had a set piece coach?
You are making me repeat the same points again and again:
As for Briggs’ dismissal, it was a long time coming. It’d be interesting to see if and when we’ll see an improvement with Slot and his staff more directly involved.
I am sure there was a period when he came on and we then conceded.
This is seemingly the simplest explanation for Slot’s recent insistence that we’re actually doing well and its only set pieces that are hindering us. It was a variation on the “give me the tools” plea.
On the first point, I thought Arne had acknowledged in the summer he needed to rotate more and had been trying to. However, one of the issues when playing badly is to get the preferred line up onto the pitch and give them all playing time. Unnecessarily swapping players in and out just adds to the disruption - which has been one of the issues we have seen affect us negatively this season.
Secondly, I thought Klopp was regularly criticised for not rotating more.
It feels like a real mess behind the scenes though…
If the set-pieces do not improve or even get worse under Slot now, Slot will be under even more pressure…
It doesn’t help when some twitter folks are saying Slot made the call!
Arsenal vs Liverpool in 10 days. We beat them 1-0. Virgil to score after delivery from a corner kick 
or it could be the other way round…
And who exactly is supposed to be rotated?
CB - was worried about Gomez’s fitness and was proved right and Leoni is done for the season
RB - both have had injury issues
LB - have been rotated but people wanted Kerkez dropped because he didn’t settle immediately.
Midfield - Other than Endo they all play plenty.
CF - people moaned when he benched Ekitike to try and get Isak match fit.
So in effect we’re talking about Endo and Chiesa here, maybe Ngumoah at a push. Neither he’s been all that interested in playing unless he has to and neither has pulled up any trees when called upon.
And I’m sure it’d be used as a stick to beat Slot with if he drops Gravenberch and Salah to play Endo and Chiesa and we go on to lose the game. We were in a rut, you put out the team you think gives you the best chance of winning the game and like it or not that best team will rarely, if ever, contain Endo or Chiesa.
Apparently the story with Briggs isn’t quite as straightforward as ‘Set piece coach turns out to be shit’
I read that Aaron Briggs was a development coach, and a really good one, who was asked to fill in the set piece job. Liverpool then ended up making him do the job permanently, and hiring another development coach to take the role he wanted to do and was really good at.
Well done boys, good process…
And has now been scapegoated to quite the angry masses its unbelievable 
.
He was initially hired to replace Victor Matos who left to go with Lijnders. The role is not well defined to those of us on the outside, but it is described as being as being responsible for managing the academy players’ transition into senior football, either with us or on loan with individual development plans. It seems the role on the training ground is a bit nebulous, acting like an extra body, and in that capacity Briggs ended up leading work on set pieces last season. Once they decided to transition him into that full time they brought this guy in to fill the position he had left.
This is a totally normal move within an organization and is rarely done without approval of the employee
It might be semantics, but I would read it less as scapegoating and more as Hughes doing his equivalent of buying Benteke for Rogers. You are responding to the excuses for why results meeting expectations and effectively saying “go on then, you’ve got what you said you needed now show me how it improves now.”
We are struggling with set pieces. The set piece coach has not been covering himself in glory. Slot let him go.
If Briggs started in another role at Liverpool and was moved to set piece coach, he either could have accepted, or taken his skillset elsewhere. He accepted, did poorly, and has been let go. If he was doing well in his initial role, I very much doubt that we would have moved him to another position.
I honestly don’t know what the big deal is. Other than someone losing their job, which is sad for him, it seems like a move to correct an area that is obviously failing.
We’ll see if we improve as the season goes. For Briggs himself, he worked at an elite team like Liverpool, so I’m sure he has desirable skills for other employers and will land on his feet. In the meantime I’d like to think we are more than fair, compensation wise, whenever we let someone go.
Why laugh at that?
Engage, but please don’t be a cock.
Its deflection of the highest order.
Didn’t we have one of the best set-piece records last season? If Briggs was in charge then what has changed so dramatically now? Also, if I recall correctly, Briggs took the job after the club failed to secure a working permit for Slot’s set-piece specialist at Feyenoord.
It’s a general point about Slot’s coaching and it is not addressing a specific period of time. Chiesa, Elliott last season, Endo, Gomez at times, even some Academy players could have accumulated some minutes and save the legs of some of the starters. Even using them as subs would help but Slot finished a number of done and dusted games with a couple of subs at hand.
I don’t know what it is exactly you’re looking for, either from us as a club or from our discussion on it.
Cards on the table - I don’t think it is reasonable to present Slot as having his hands clean with our failures in this part of our game. All of these specialist coaches are in place to supplement and support Slot not to work independently of him. The idea Briggs could be approaching defending set pieces in a way that Slot disagreed with but had his hands tied because he was not the set piece coach is farcical. But we are failing in this area and Slot has increasingly painted those specific failings as the main issue. Either our approach is all wrong, and that ultimately falls on Slot, or our implementation of the ideas is bad and that falls on Briggs. No organization in the world would try to fix this defect by firing the person higher in the Org chart as a first option and so Briggs was always going to be sacrificed first if set pieces was determined by leadership to be the achilies heel. But in making that move it is less a show of faith in Slot and more a case of giving him enough rope to hang himself. It has removed an excuse and we either improve in this area now or Slot is likely next out. It is a statement that says “ok, for now we’ll buy your explanation, but now its up to you to show us how you fix it.”