Misery has been replaced with apathy. I don’t know what’s worst.
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Another six days to endure yet.
They’re going the McDonalds route instead
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Tbh this is exactly what it is, and we all know it at heart, and its absolutely fucking disgraceful that our team is doing this, you dont go from champions to players who dont give a shit whilst doing the bare minimum just to get on the fringes of champions league…
Its obvious there are squad players there who think they are above the manager (Salah outburst earlier in the year as proof)… and honestly any player who is deliberately putting in sub par performances just to get a manager sacked..should be shown the door.
And yes i do believe slot should go just based on this season, but if the players have been doing this, they should all be replaced /sold etc because it has no place in this club, let alone in football
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What a dumb fuck Rooney is… Redirecting...
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Just on the subject of snarkiness, apart from the bit about having a pop at Slot (which Livvy was mistaken in assuming was directed at her, and I’ve apologised for my part in that confusion) I don’t think there is anything snarky about not liking using the 10/11 season - in which Hodgson had twenty games of shite before Kenny had to come to the rescue - as a comparison with this year.
I don’t like the comparison with Roy, and I have little time for anyone suggesting that Slot is as bad as Roy.
Roy Hodgson came to Liverpool off the back of a moderately successful season (by his standards) with Fulham to be essentially a corporate yes man to the pricks in charge. He was there to not rock the boat while Hicks and Gillette embarked upon increasingly desperate measures to refinance their loans.
He cultivated a long standing management career by downward managing expectations, telling fans that they shouldn’t dream, berating them for not being happy with one win in three games. His football was defensive, anti-possession, shape oriented, risk adverse 442, and it just sucked the joy out of life. In addition to this, despite his football gentleman reputation, he was also a snide little cunt, with a tendency to be aggressive and spiteful towards comments that questioned him.
From day one he was clearly the wrong choice and he should never have been appointed. I forget who said they, probably someone on the wrap, but you can sum up Hodgson by this epithet. He has found himself dealing with lads like Torres and Gerrard, but he has absolutely no business at all with elite footballers, and someone who has no business with elite footballers has no business at Liverpool FC.
Obviously suggesting that Slot isn’t as bad as he was is the very faintest of praise I can muster. He should be sacked at the end of the season, but I don’t like that it isn’t enough to judge him on his failures - which more than warrant his P45. We are also seeing commentator resorting to hyperbole and exaggeration to get themselves heard above the noise. This season has been horrible, but it isn’t in the same category as the four months of Hodgson, which was exhausting, existential, heartbreak and struggle, and who knows where it would have ended if he’d been allowed to continue.
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It depends on your profession. There surely are jobs where you can work far away and still be effective. But I’m not sure that this applies to the specific jobs of head coach and DoF of a massive football club like ours. The least I’d expect from these two roles is to be 100% involved and identified with what they do. I could be wrong, but I’m not convinced that going back to Holland or the South coast all the time is helpful in that regard.
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Hughes and Slot could be living on Mars for all I care, as long as they did their job well.
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Ordinarily I wouldn’t consider it an issue, but there are two big caveats for me
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he was known for being present in his time at Bournemouth. That is where he made his reputation and he should very carefully consider how such a different way of working is impacting the quality of his work
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His role is not just signings and sales, but is more or less the CEO of football. Smooth operations at Kirkby is essentially his remit with the players just one part of that. Even before these comments from Mo we have reasons to believe the culture was eroding. Would it if the boss’ boss was as ever present as he was in the position where he made his name? How is he getting a full perspective of how well everything is going at Kirkby if he is rarely there?
If everything was rosy it would feel a silly criticism, but it isn’t and there is seemingly a big disconnect about that. I think it is reasonable to question if being more present would change any of this.
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Which they clearly aren’t.
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Slot is more like Rodgers. A guy who can talk a good game and impress the suits but is ultimately not the calibre of Coach required.
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Aye, my model for it is an initial period defined by continuity with only small changes within the range that a team typically makes year on year even with the same manager. Over time though things eroded. Either through an imperceptible drop in standards of the things they ostensibly continued doing, or because the cumulative effect of bad trade offs on the new things that had been introduced (e.g. reduction of within season training load). If you look at the first couple of games under Slot and the goals were straight out of a team working on muscle memory. After 12 months of messages about “control” and “making one more pass” are we even making those aggressive runs off the ball let alone trying to hit them with the early pass?
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I remember Darwin scoring a cracker from a tough angle and Arne questioned the attempt even though he was pleased with the goal. We know Darwin could misfire but I found Slot’s reaction odd at the time.
Now it all fits.
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Potentially. But a lot of them come when we ourselves have opened up trying to force something. The pattern we have seen this season is a base approach that is relatively defensively stable (outside of set pieces) but tepid in possession. For us to start looking more threatening we have to open up, typically with attacking subs, and we cannot do that without becoming incredibly vulnerable when OOP. We have 2 game modes neither of which are where we want to be or satisfactory. One is boring as fuck and the other is chaotic and ineffective at both ends of the pitch. And that latter is how we’ve finished most of our games this season hence the absurd number of late goals in either direction.
But the other issue is we have no clear way of playing the players are confident in. No patterns that are reflex. Nothing they can lean on when put under pressure. Given that it is no surprise at thing that it breaks in critical ways towards the end of games when the pressure is highest.
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It is potentially worse. It is likely they are both wonderfully insightful thinkers about the game and would be fantastic speakers at a conference where they share their ideas. That means when everything is rosy their ideas can flourish. But, maybe, both men lack a little something in terms of personality, specifically around leadership, to be able to deal with situations once they become difficult and alienate the people around them with the CYA behavior and “its not my fault” attitude.
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We don’t know how much they work far away though do we? We just know the live far away - Slot isn’t going back to the Netherlands every day is he? As long as they are present for the times they need to be present then it could still work if when they have time off they go home. Hence staying over combined with commuting. They don’t need to be in or near Liverpool 24x7. They do a decent amount of time and they need to be available to make decisions and attend meetings, but that can be remote in some instances too. What matters it their performance in the role, not where they call home.
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Aye and in the corporate world this is a totally normal set up. Especially when you are compensated at this level having a second/temporary home closeish to work to facilitate going into the office as needed (rarely every day at the executive level) without having to disturb your primary home is not even worth a second consideration
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People use comparitors all the time, relevant or not. I have little time for people using American Football terminology when speakeing about football, like Alonso being called a quarterback…but people still do it. So you have to accept that people will compare our current situation with Rodgers or Hodgson as manager .
You don’t like it, but it will happen.
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Roy was sacked after 20 league games so sure we cannot use the entire season stats as a comparison. But the point is he was sacked…as in his performance was far under expectations. When any part of your performance over an extended period is comparable to what was achieved under Roy that is undeniably bad and Slot this season has a worse GA per game than the one that saw Roy get sacked. Yes there are other factors that suggest it is not as bad as then (more goals and more PPG) but Roy was also managing in a much darker period with much more obstacles to overcome.
It is not a perfect comparison, but none are.
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I think the comparison with Rodgers is actually quite appropriate. They both had great seasons, and a follow up that desperately disappointed, punctuated by an insipid ten game ‘recovery’ before reverting to form in a brutal fashion, and got to the point where everything they said or did only contributed to the sense that they were suddenly wildly out of their depth.
The only reason I don’t like the comparison with Hodgson is that he was transparently the wrong appointment on day one, added absolutely nothing of value in his short tenure and was a thoroughly dislikable bellend. If you could distill everything a Liverpool manager shouldn’t be in a single person, it would be Roy Hodgson.