If they keep Slot, this would be the first time that they don’t agree with the overwhelming consensus of the supporters.
You dont have to have exact situations in order to have parallels.
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I’m with you here, but I would still like to see a more robust option in the middle. MacAllister for Wharton, or Anderson, would be good. Looking farther afield, maybe someone like Lamine Camara, or perhaps Ederson at Atalanta.
Anyway, I’m virtually of the same view as you. Good analysis of the midfield right now being affected by the lack of a coordinated forward press, and the defence dropping deeper.
It wasnt aimed at you pal.
There’s no such thing as overwhelming consensus of supporters. No actual verifiable data exists of that.
Secondly, you don’t judge the quality of decisions on the basis of popularity.
Yeah it doesn’t have to be exact, but it still needs to be substantive. And so far the only real similarity is the poor performance and results…
I get that we’re dissapointed. But it doesn’t mean that we stop thinking with our heads…
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Unfortunately, it seems his approach was akin to bringing a knife to a gunfight.
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Spearman’s algorithm disagrees.
Yeah, he’s not Dutch for nothing. But what we have seen has nothing to do with ‘total football’, which also relies on pressing from the front and massive physical engagement from the players (even if looks less for positive chaos than Klopp’s Gegenpress, and for more control). Instead of this, we have seen turgid, directionless games, without anything recognizable in terms of tactics, and with a very bad physical effort from the players. That must come from somewhere, must it not?
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Graun getting in on the act:
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Aye. I’d say it is tactical but, as you point out in quoting Slot’s comment, not a tactical issue in the sense that he doesn’t care about us winning the ball back high and early. He wants us to, but his tactical approach, and/or his coaching, doesnt set us up to succeed in doing it.
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This graph is telling:
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I’ll add to that that from what I read, on here, Slot was being sold as the continuity option.
I think your question on how many windows would this take most pertinent. To add to that I’d ask, if this was the plan, why didn’t we do business in Jan?
Our players haven’t the profile for this type of system. At the base of the midfield you need a Busquet or Kroos type player, the only one we had that could do that was TAA so why didn’t we do a better job at keeping him?
Who is there out there that can be bought in to take that role?
What aren’t we picking up lots more yellow cards and subbing off players who are reaching the refs limit so as not get red cards? (I mean that’s what that style requires with a massive dose of cynicism).
If this really was the plan then why not communicate it as it’s the most mitigating point that he has, it demands patience.
Where is the money going to come from?
I mean our squad just has to be completely replaced, it’s no wonder Slot was saying 'the players aren’t playing as I instructed course they aren’t they aren’t cut out for it.
Why bypass that essential step of securing a DM and try going for the throat with a player like Wirtz skipping all the other steps?
More importantly why such a short contract for Slot if this was the plan?
Yes it looks like a possible explanation to what we’re seeing. However why is it being executed so badly? Who thinks this could even work in the EPL?
As you point out there’s just too many questions and no foreseeable solutions. It does explain our big spend last summer however are FSG prepared to go the distance?
Interesting to say the least and one that would test the fans patience.
In anycase I don’t think Slot is up to that, you don’t put your faith in a player like Gravenberch for a system like that.
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Absolutely, and you probably need two ballplaying centre backs, not just one. Currently of our starting back four, only Virgil is good enough to play in that system. In our midfield, only Macca has the required skills but is mysteriously lacking in every other department this season. He was never the fastest but made up with positioning and he’s strong for a small fella. But this season all those attributes are missing.
And I don’t even know what our forward line is supposed to be…we have chopped and changed so much that suffice to say it’s in complete disarray.
Just too many questions and no satisfactory answers. I’m not even going to get into the pass-and-move movement needed to succed with such a system. We are SO static on the pitch! Most of our effort is 10 Reds standing and watching one of their teammates trying to extricate himself from the grasp of two opposing players.
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That’s pretty much why I screamed at the TV screen like an old man shouting at the sky Every.Single.Time with the lack of movements. There were no way for any players with the ball to release it to the teammates.
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Interpreting that is interesting/problematic because it isn’t clear how it handles the fact that we played Match Days 15 and 29 out of sequence in 24/25. But it does show that around Match Day 22, we started allowing more chances while producing significantly fewer. Interesting that 22 was a win following 2 draws. There was then a period of recovery starting at MD28, 4 rounds of improving attack while holding xGA flat. Also notable that despite the dire finish to the season, we were creating more than at any point this season (also interesting to see that by xG, the Spurs game wasn’t better than the ones that followed it).
This season, the first 5 games show we were playing dull but effective defensive football except for Round 2. The catastrophic next 5 in xG terms really should not have been so much worse. I can see why Slot would be baffled, and indeed why he has been frustrated much of the season with that kind of margin. Equally though, something bad started in Round 31 (Brighton), or more accurately 29 (Wolves) that was interrupted for 30 (Spurs). Even during the 3 wins last month, we were in decline. The past 2 games are a whole new level of crisis.
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Yep, overall it is getting worse. The five wins at the start really helped. The three recent wins will probably be the difference between qualifying or not qualifying for the CL (let’s see though, as it is touch and go).
But overall the footy has not been very good, and is getting worse. It would be very rare for the same manager to turn it around, after such a prolonged poor spell. I have been trying to extend the benefit of the doubt as much as possible, but I am struggling to see many signs that give me hope for the future, should he stay.
With that said, if he is backed to continue (I don’t think that will happen) I will support him because he is the Liverpool manager, and getting on his back going into next season will be self-defeating.
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It’s a six match rolling average, so it shows that it is a trend rather than just a blip in form.
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Ian Graham has made some really good points about xG. His take is not that its a bad statistic, but that its badly named and needs to be significantly refined to express what most non-statisticians think it means. Essentially it can be inflated by a team (or player) taking a large number of low value shots, and the game value, or its predictive ability regarding the result, of the statistic can be biased in such situations. Basically if you take a shit shot you can increase the xG by taking another 5 of them, but you still dont actually expect to score from the 5th such shit shot so you end up with a higher xG than you feel there should be from quality chances created. He says to get predictive value out of it you also need to adjust by what xG you lose by taking the shot at that time vs keeping the ball and doing more constructive than blaming it into the kop.
I think that largely explains a lot of the Slot’s confusion over why our results are worse than xG suggests, and why his claims to that have been so badly received by fans because they didnt match what our eyes were seeing.
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Yeah, some better games early in the stack are being replaced by some dire performances.
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I would agree with that, but in the sense that is really only an explanation for that terrible run of matches from Round 6 to Round 11 that look much worse than raw xG suggests. The overall differential is striking, only a couple of times does it reach what was merely the average last season. It appears this season’s peak is 0.7, which is below one expected goal. That is one jammy shot away from a disappointing result - last season we had multiple matches with xG differential greater than 2, and the average must be above 7. It definitely is until we hit the February slide last season.
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