Arne Slot - Head Coach

Klopp looked ill I thought.

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If we hadn’t won another game after 8th March we would have still been champions.

Times like this I miss Cynnie (I have a few of my own that go by without remedy).

Yep, you are seeing it straight. Wirtz, on the evidence so far, has not played as well as he can. There are various factors contributing, including settling in a new team and league, finding partnerships on the pitch, and hitting better form, all while the team is struggling.

One of the factors, for me, is that Wirtz is also struggling a bit with Salah on the pitch. Salah has been a main man for years. Lots of play goes through him, and for years we have seen him trouble defenders, score lots of goals and get lots of assists. In exchange for his incredible output Salah has not been expected to do much defensively, but he has justified it.

Not any more. The output isn’t there.

My view is one is on the way down the other the way up. The sooner Slot makes a big call, the better. This is going to be Wirtz’s team, not Salah’s. It’s in a transition period now so not everyone sees it, and some, like you, laugh.

I’m giving my honest football opinion. I love Salah for what he has done, but during this season I think we will see a transition as he decreases and Wirtz and the new breed increase.

In the meantime Salah will still make a contribution and I’m backing him to improve his form, but it’s clear to me that the die is cast and the transition is on.

What stage…as I said in the game…up shit street without a paddle…no fight, no game plans, no urgency…we just keep playing backwards…

To replace one that died and one that most people thought it’s time to sell.
Is it wrong that we went for two of the best that were available?
Or do you think that the reason we haven’t bought a DM is because we spent the money available? If so, I think you’re wrong there.

But seriously, can anyone see Slot recovering from this? The way he presents himself in front of the microphones and on the sideline. It doesn’t seem like he has a plan and I think he is a shit man manager.

That’s what you get when you make polls instead of attending games when you have a 100% record…

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Salah’s not playing well but removing him doesn’t solve all of our problems, or even many of them.

Wirtz played against Galatasaray without Salah and still struggled. If we drop Salah, and keep this current formation, the options are Frimpong, Chiesa or Wirtz on the right. That’s not a long term solution. We’re not flush with options.

Isak, so far, has been worse than Salah. He’s getting away with it because the heat is on Mo, but he has done absolutely nothing.

I wouldn’t say lots of play is going through Salah. His touches are way down. We’re playing on the other side through Gakpo.

Fixing this mess is going to take a hell of a lot more than removing one player from the 11.

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Autumn time and the bloody pitch forks are out. :man_facepalming:
How are we turning into Mancs supporters?

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I completely agree. Removing Salah does not solve all our problems. We have a lot of issues right now. Still, I am saying that Wirtz and the new attacking breed need to come to the fore while Salah plays a support role to it, not a main man role.

It will be greatly helped if the likes of Isak and Frimpong were fit, and they were all in better form. But that’s the future that is coming.

Besides that there are other issues. We are very leaky defensively, and teams are cutting through our midfield way too easily.

Thinking out loud, but I might sacrifice someone like Mac Allister for a more robust player like Wharton or Anderson to give it a bit more solidity. Even more glaring than that is we need to sign a central defender or two.

We made a lot of moves in the summer to refresh the team. It looks like it will take a while to click. But there are more moves we need to make to finish what we started and rebuild the team.

And now it’s all getting very silly.

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That’s pretty much where I am too.

We won’t see another player like Salah for a long time, but it’s time to build this team around Wirtz, Isak, Szoboszlai and Gravenberch.

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The thing is that we’ve been hearing this for a few seasons now (I think since he turned 30, more every season, more with every bad/drought spell), and yet he kept delivering the numbers in the end.
Goals like today’s give hope, and even though it’s a worrisome spell indeed regarding Salah, we’ll see whether he instantly became incapable of providing the numbers or not.
At least until we have a world class right winger (and we haven’t brought one for all the additions we’ve made, even if Frimpong is meant to cover that position as well during AFCON), I don’t see him dropped for now.

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I don’t understand how Wirtz gets such a free pass for been abysmal again like most games. He has another chance to get off the mark from about 12 yards out and he doesn’t even get it on target. He gets good effort Salah would have been slagged off no end.

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It was a good chance and Wirtz should have scored. It dropped for him quickly, but it was very doable. He hit it clean but it was swerving away. Even a scuffed contact on target probably would have scored.

He has had 3 or 4 good chances and not taken any.

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I thought he was good tonight, as he generally is. Not £100m quid good, but you can see the quality is there.

Abysmal is stretching it.

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Im growing tired of his reference to things being this way when you make a lot of changes. We had 2 forced on us and 1 (Darwin) that really was the only fair options for all parties. That is not that much. Everything else, the bits that now we’re saying were destabilizing, were choices we chose to make. And again, we made those choices when we were starting with an already successful side of a good age so its not like we needed to blow it up to get younger because we kept the players who were providing that risk

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