The invert fullbacks/tucked out wingers thing wasn’t there or at least not done consistently in the West Ham match, so I thought maybe we finally moved on. But no, we went back to it just with different players. Multiple times I could see Macca move to outside and have space to progress but the ball inevitably got passed back to the centre backs. Szobo and Grav spun around several times with the ball and couldn’t make a pass. I don’t get why we are persisting with a system that doesn’t work, and this is just me feeling, but I think the players are getting fed up with it (except for Gakpo, he seems to be the type who follows instructions to the t). They seem confused and non committing rather than simply making mistakes.
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I mentioned that in the match thread. Gomez was definitely inverting through the game. I have absolutely no idea why.
Yesterday was pretty normal from what I could gather. I even saw Gravenberch dropping to create a 3 shape at the back in some build up moments.
This is our average positions of yesterday, though of course we seemed to flip the formation near the end of the game.
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Hope I’m wrong here but I don’t think we’ll get the best out of Wirtz while Salah is still here. There’s a consensus amongst fans that we should build the team around Wirtz (I agree) but as we saw yesterday as soon as Salah came on the pitch everything went through him. Last season Salah was superhuman and carried this team on his back to a title so it’s only natural for the majority of players to just look for him at every opportunity and hope he pulls off a bit of magic. It just means Wirtz gets pushed out to the periphery. Wirtz 2 best games for us have come against Frankfurt and West Ham, both games Salah wasn’t on the pitch. It’s up to Slot to find a way to get the best out of both but so far this season he hasn’t managed to get the best out of either which is disappointing as they’re both superstars.
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Wirtz also played really well (as the team did) against Real, being inside left that night and Salah was in his role on the right. Their qualities compliment each other.
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yeah, well, cant argue with that.
i havent seen enough of Isak in anything but a red shirt, but it doesnt look great, we could press with 5 and he still needs to be harder to beat.
love to know what Slots philosophy is though, regarding pressing, i mean he must have a theory, a plan, its not as simple as some claim that hes ‘just clueless’, i mean, half the fans on the terrace could set out a basic template on how the team should play when out of possession.
i keep wondering what it is he sold Wirtz on over the summer, Wirtzs camp was adament it was a discussion with Slot that tipped the scales in our favour,so what was said, what was Slots grand plan for Wirtz, and does this current set up resemble it in anyway at all, and what must be going through Wirtzs mind.
the seasons gone, yes there is still stuff to play for, but Slots got breathing room in the weirdest sense of the meaning that he didnt have last season where every result became critical after we realised we were in with a shout…
we should be seeing a resemblance of what Slots Liverpool masterplan is. i dont see it.
kinda lost myself to the original point being made here though…
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I only just watched the LFC vs Sunderland post match press conference. Oh dear, it was depressing. He continued to single out players not doing well, rather than biting the bullet and said that it was his mistakes in the tactical set up, and taking the spotlights away from the players. Again, he kept on talking about set pieces so many times (I am so effing sick on the focus on set pieces). He talked about moment of magic several times (and actually in other interviews) instead of using the talent of the players, team play to set up and score goals. 
Before watching the press conference, I was still somewhat hopefully. Now, I am really concerned on how he is going to take us out of this slump. This is effing depressing.
…and now I remember one of Kloppo saying: "“The confidence is a little flower and when someone stamps on it, it is really difficult…
“We have to fight through this. The boys can play much better. My job is to create a situation where they can deliver. For that, you need stability and consistency."
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The fierce spotlight that has been trained on one world-class legend switched to another on Anfield’s latest desperate night.
The Beeb piece by McNulty is on Virgil but it’s the last bit of that snippet that got me and hit home a bit. It’s truly become desperate. Arguments about the last two games being a start and some positives to be taken are wide of the mark. Wednesday was more of the same and while we take whatever luck we can get, we fluked a draw. At home. Against Sunderland.
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I can’t believe that Salah and Wirtz cannot co-exist. On the contrary, they should benefit from one anotherm
Being proven doesn’t mean much. Slot was proven. So was Ten Hag. It’s only after they get the job and significant time passes that a proper assessment can be made. Unfortunately, it seems that Hughes got this one wrong.
Look, he won our second PL in decades. It can’t be that wrong surely, his appointment?
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To be fair Arne did win the league!!
I sort of see what you’re saying that being ‘proven’ doesn’t guarantee success, but neither does hiring someone who isn’t proven 
. I assume you mean Ten Hagg by the way?
I agree that we appear to have made the wrong appointment for the long term with Slot. I generally really like him and I hate the sack culture before anyone has time to build anything so I hope he turns it around. Zero reason to think he will though sadly.
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We’ve seen Isak be a single striker in a pressing (although also inconsistent) Newcastle team, so he can do it, when he’s fit and firing. However, he arrived with months without not only playing football, but collective training. He missed also the end of last season if I’m not wrong. Clearly out of shape and then shape is also one thing, understanding with team mates is another.
It’s definitely an aspect I’ve been wondering how would press initially look like when some of these players arrived. The most offensive positioned players need to be also our first defenders. Though I didn’t think Wirtz would somewhat struggle with the physicality and intensity. Ekitike came sooner than Isak and showed he’s technically of high quality, but pressing isn’t his forte.
I don’t think Slot’s prinicples off the ball are very much different to what we’ve been used to (and what we wanted to reach: PSG), but there can be a plan and there’s actually doing or succeeding at it. It’s such a phase of the game that if it’s not working well, it can look like an absolute mess. My problem is not only our lack of a quality press, but not succeeding at a press doesn’t mean the opponent cut through the rest of the team so easily. Our defensive transition’s been poor.
Obviously it might take more time, we’ve seen it at other places, the problems we have are nothing unique in football (but it’s true we didn’t have them in a while, perhaps since the days of Rodgers or even before). Whether we can raise it to a high level during the season with limited training time and a lot of games (of losing a lot of points so far)… that’s the big question. Because we look like we need at least a mini pre-season.
As for Wirtz, for me, that’s actually the (or one of two) easiest transfer of last summer to understand (even if you could say that signing a striker was clear early enough last season), especially from Slot’s point of view. Basically come in and be one of the main players between the lines. It’s not been all bad, but we cannot pretend like he’s played like he can either. Hopefully he comes great.
My bigger confusion is the choice of players we’ve signed for the full back positions and getting two strikers (but less so than full backs). Journalists could ask some more tactical questions, press-conferences are not really a place for that, but Slot does appear sometimes in these shows where they can go into a bit more depth.
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Agree with all this, especially bolded.
That sad thing for me is that it’s gone from Slot is safe because of runs on the board to burning through all his goodwill and now needs to demonstrate again that he deserves to stay as liverpool manager.
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It depends on your perspective, I guess.
The title was amazing, but if it came at the cost of reverting back to the pre-Klopp years, I’d rather we hadn’t won it in the first place. Obviously, we are not there yet and despite of all my criticism, I do like Slot on a personal level, and I do want him to succeed, but all the signs point that it was a flash in the pan.
That’s just not good enough for me and it shouldn’t be good enough for anyone at the club either.
How many teams in the history of the PL has won the league by a flash in the pan?
None.
Edit: some may have won it through cash in the pan…but thats a different story.
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I find this impossible to believe being even close to what happened. I get why it is raised as a possibility, but it would be such an enormous break from what everyone involved in our past success has openly acknowledged was key to making approach work that I cannot imagine Hughes dictating to a manager like that.
Maybe the emphasis of him being coach rather than manager was done to give them a bit more license to dictate on the specific identity of the prioritized target (the famous, I know you like Reus but we prefer Salah conversation) but I refuse to believe that they did not at least set out on a path after aligning on what the vision for the new team would be, what the gaps were, and what the characteristics of the players were needed to address that. Even focusing on the issues like “our FBs are runners not passers and that is why we’re struggling”…we know, at least historically, our data guys make that sort of distinction in how they analyze players. When they are looking for a FB they arent just looking for players who have played FB, but have characteristics of what they expect a liverpool FB to do and go and find players who score well in those specific areas. The idea we would have bought Slot a lamp when he wanted a table because we didn’t care about what Slot wanted, or we didnt appreciate the difference just seems absolutely impossible to me.
There are many ways this sort of process can break down despite everyone believing they are playing their part fully, especially when its the first time the principals are going through it together. So it is possible they were all working towards the same goals and somehow still ended up with Slot having players who weren’t what he thought he said he needed and now he’s stuck trying to make good out of a bad situation. But I think the most likely explanation is the were faults in the vision or in our attempts to implement once the players arrived, and our attempts to respond to that in real time over the first few difficult weeks of the season (wins, but clearly with a team that wasnt working the way it was supposed to) made it worse. Change management is a hard thing. There is a reason there is a fuckload of money to made in business from helping businesses go through these things
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Lets take the bull by the horns and be the first club with an AI manager 
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Then we would end up with 10 players on the pitch, including 3 goalkeepers, and a centre-forward with an indeterminate number of legs.
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The specific language might be harsh, but the general sentiment is a very relevant concern. Business is full of CEOs who were successful when taking over already thriving companies but only for as long as they were a steady hand keeping the momentum going, but then either allowed it to run out of steam or drove it into a ditch when trying to implement the change they thought was necessary to future proof the company.
Change is hard to implement successfully and football is no different to business in this regard. Having had success with an already competitive side says very little about whether that person has what it takes to lead them through the change necessary to evolve into the next version of the side.
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