How could 2 wingers help out if the opposition just pour through the centre?
It’s a crazed mans dream, no?
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My guess is that there are three ways they may help - one, the pace and threat of the wingers make opposing teams hesitate in pouring forward or expose them for leaving too few behind to defend counter attacks. Two, his wingers often move into the centre to provide additional numbers in that space. Three, if they are staying wide then perhaps the fullbacks move into the centre instead.
Two wingers won’t do squat. The Chelsea match proved it. It’s a team game. If everyone else isn’t up to speed they will just crowd out or foul the wingers like they did with Rio and Frimpong (someone already mentioned this in the post match thread).
The problem is systemic.
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Slot has become the Kier Starmer of football management.
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He is basically telling us “correlation doesn’t mean causation”…
and proceeds to provide a litany of correlations…
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I’m dubious about that as we’re already seeing that with Kerkez and Jones (with Kerkez being our most improved player this season imo). Our wingers are forced to come right back to help out and offer nothing in counters. (Who wants Liverpool to become a counter attacking team?
Nothing that can be argued can convince me. I used pour through however they slice through our centre without committing too many forward, this is the problem, when we counter Wirtz, Gakpo, Salah just get crowded out.
I always feel you need to sort out the centre of the pitch before you start changing what’s on the wings, even I could run up and down a wing.
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Indeed, I don’t think anyone of us saw this coming. I was very critical of the club’s transfer policy during the summer, but even so, expected us to be in the run for the top three places at the very least.
But we were then hit with a string of incredibly hard events to take for everyone:
- Jota’s passing.
- the emotions linked to that (Salah said at the time that he was afraid to come back to the club for the new season, and that was surely a fair reflection of everyone’s state of mind right then).
- the disruption in our physical preparation due to this.
- then bad, long-term injuries hitting us like almost never before. Our season would obviously have been better as a whole if Bradley, Leoni, Isak, Allison and now also Ekitike would have been available more regularly.
All of this isn’t Slot’s fault, not at all. But still, it’s the manager’s job to find solutions when problems arise, and Slot has not only not been able to do that, but there are no signs of him finding solutions for next season, and that’s the most problematic aspect of our situation. He failed to provoke a reaction within the squad to fight this out, and to mentally prepare the players to come back firing out of all guns next season. Instead of that, you can see disinterest, lethargy, and an acceptance among the players that they will lose games. Even worse, there is no recognizable path laid in front of them to regroup and at least work towards a better style of football next season.
That’s why I think that his fate is already sealed. We’ll see.
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I have been wondering who’ll go first. When Starmer goes the alternative could be even worse! Hopefully if Slot goes we’ll be back on the march again!
Worse than the serious danger we were in as a club when Hodgson was here?
No.
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If we get Wes Streeting as manager , I’ll stick to Scottish football.
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At this point I’d take Wes Brown. 
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It’s kinda funny knowing that Slot did so well with a squad that is not meddled with by himself or Hughes.
The moment these 2 fellas got involved, it all went to shit.
I will be very surprised if these 2 are retained…
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It will do fuck all against a team who is more than willing to sit back against your wingers, stick a man in the middle when Gravenberch sashay his way forwards. We will still get sliced apart…
I’ve long believed the ‘pouring through midfield’ issue is actually a symptom of two different issues.
-
There is no pressing from the forwards. Obviously a forward press isn’t going to 100% stop the ball coming into midfield, but without any pressure on the ball at all, it’s arriving with the midfielders totally in control of ball - and these are Premier League players. You can’t just go and take the ball off them. There simply isn’t the opportunity for a secondary press (which is often when the ball is won back). We’ve lost Jota, Nunez and Diaz - all players who selflessly pressed the defenders. We now have Salah, Ekitike, Gakpo Isak and Rio - players who absolutely don’t/can’t.
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The defence are reacting to this lack of midfield control by dropping deeper to give themselves time to react to the attack. If the press is working, the defenders push up to squeeze the space the midfielders have to cover.
The end result is that without the ball the midfielders are having to cover more space and they are faced with players who have the ball 100% under control, meaning it’s near impossible to take it off them.
It’s for this reason I don’t think - as some have suggested - bombing out the midfielders and buying a destroyer is the answer. No midfielders could prosper in these conditions.
The only one I’d look to move on is Mac Allister, as he genuinely looks fucked. The rest are not being helped by structural issues in the rest of the team.
The most important shopping we need to do is two or three wide players who will get stuck into the graft of making it difficult for the opposition to play out.
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Admittedly this is the first thing that caught my eye and my first thought was “yes he was a decent passer but his finishing is what we really miss on the pitch”
and then it hit me what you meant 
https://x.com/i/status/2054130337710485587
Someone has predicted the future and it is grim AF…
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Yeah great, let’s get in more nerds with no man managment or a lack of basic human skills. that’s what the club needs. Better not turn out to be true.
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I’ve been saying for ages that I think Slot will stay. Obviously he isn’t turning things round so he’ll probably be sacked in the autumn. By which time Xabi may be at Chelsea or elsewhere.
We have been shit for over 12 months now, but there has been noise that the owners may feel there are mitigating circumstances. Provided we scrape into CL I think he is safe from being booted sadly.
Precisely? So it was fine to use it to run the rule over Klopp’s final season at Dortmund to conclude the fundamentals were still sound and they were just outrageously unlucky in their results. But it is inappropriate to use it to assess Slot’s performance this season?
But ignoring that contradiction, if this is the wrong way to use such an algorithmic approach, when is the correct time to use it and how should it be used?
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When it’s suits him, naturally.
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