He was initially hired to replace Victor Matos who left to go with Lijnders. The role is not well defined to those of us on the outside, but it is described as being as being responsible for managing the academy players’ transition into senior football, either with us or on loan with individual development plans. It seems the role on the training ground is a bit nebulous, acting like an extra body, and in that capacity Briggs ended up leading work on set pieces last season. Once they decided to transition him into that full time they brought this guy in to fill the position he had left.
This is a totally normal move within an organization and is rarely done without approval of the employee
It might be semantics, but I would read it less as scapegoating and more as Hughes doing his equivalent of buying Benteke for Rogers. You are responding to the excuses for why results meeting expectations and effectively saying “go on then, you’ve got what you said you needed now show me how it improves now.”
We are struggling with set pieces. The set piece coach has not been covering himself in glory. Slot let him go.
If Briggs started in another role at Liverpool and was moved to set piece coach, he either could have accepted, or taken his skillset elsewhere. He accepted, did poorly, and has been let go. If he was doing well in his initial role, I very much doubt that we would have moved him to another position.
I honestly don’t know what the big deal is. Other than someone losing their job, which is sad for him, it seems like a move to correct an area that is obviously failing.
We’ll see if we improve as the season goes. For Briggs himself, he worked at an elite team like Liverpool, so I’m sure he has desirable skills for other employers and will land on his feet. In the meantime I’d like to think we are more than fair, compensation wise, whenever we let someone go.
Didn’t we have one of the best set-piece records last season? If Briggs was in charge then what has changed so dramatically now? Also, if I recall correctly, Briggs took the job after the club failed to secure a working permit for Slot’s set-piece specialist at Feyenoord.
It’s a general point about Slot’s coaching and it is not addressing a specific period of time. Chiesa, Elliott last season, Endo, Gomez at times, even some Academy players could have accumulated some minutes and save the legs of some of the starters. Even using them as subs would help but Slot finished a number of done and dusted games with a couple of subs at hand.
I don’t know what it is exactly you’re looking for, either from us as a club or from our discussion on it.
Cards on the table - I don’t think it is reasonable to present Slot as having his hands clean with our failures in this part of our game. All of these specialist coaches are in place to supplement and support Slot not to work independently of him. The idea Briggs could be approaching defending set pieces in a way that Slot disagreed with but had his hands tied because he was not the set piece coach is farcical. But we are failing in this area and Slot has increasingly painted those specific failings as the main issue. Either our approach is all wrong, and that ultimately falls on Slot, or our implementation of the ideas is bad and that falls on Briggs. No organization in the world would try to fix this defect by firing the person higher in the Org chart as a first option and so Briggs was always going to be sacrificed first if set pieces was determined by leadership to be the achilies heel. But in making that move it is less a show of faith in Slot and more a case of giving him enough rope to hang himself. It has removed an excuse and we either improve in this area now or Slot is likely next out. It is a statement that says “ok, for now we’ll buy your explanation, but now its up to you to show us how you fix it.”
Yeah, Ettiene Reijnen. He was primarily an analyst, but also responsible for set pieces. He didn’t qualify for a work permit because he didnt have formal UEFA badges. It seems the work he would have done was split between Van Der Ham (analysis) and Briggs (set pieces)
Perfection, anything less is unacceptable. Of course I’m sure people hold themselves to this same standard too.
Ultimately it’s a case of bloke hired to do job. Does job less well than expected and everyone rightly moans. Gets sacked and some of those same people who moaned about him not doing a good job now moan about him getting hired in the first place and him getting sacked. Clubs fault for hiring him, Slot’s fault for firing him.
Just find a stick, any stick will do and use it to beat whoever your current gripe is with. Won’t be long until someone blames Gakpo for this as he’s a bit of a lightning rod at the moment.
Yeah, let’s chuck some more academy kids in whilst we’re trying to secure a second league title in 35 years.
We definitely needed more Tyler Morton game time even though we all knew he wasn’t going to be around this season.
Last season he’d just joined the club, a huge step up for him and he’s quite rightly wants to make a strong start. He then finds himself in a title race he could win. This season we’ve struggled badly.
You can say it’s not about a specific time period but when exactly do you want him giving these squad players and academy kids a bit of game time? The cup competitions maybe. Well go look at the sides he put out in the league and FA Cup last season including the one where Chiesa, Elliott, Endo, Gomez and Quansah all started and we got knocked out by Plymouth.
Klopp always talked about wanting a smaller squad than most, Slot seems to be of the same opinion. For one of them that was fine, for the other it’s a stick to beat him with.
Slot’s argument last year was he didn’t have enough good players to go beyond the 14-15 he used regularly and if he was going to do the rotation necessary for us to still be fresh at the business end of the CL season we needed to make personnel changes to support him. That is what drove our summer business - getting rid of as many players as they could outside of that core group and replacing them with alternatives Slot would be more willing to use.
Reading the statement, it sounds as if Briggs isn’t being replaced. Slot and the other coaches will take over set piece training.
It sounds like the coaching staff haven’t been on the same page, and this has led to the players unsure as to what they were meant to be doing. In fairness, this is exactly what it looks like on the pitch.
I don’t know if this has been a personality issue, or simply Hughes hiring mismatched personnel.
He was doing the job unofficially last year so you have to think it was working well enough then for him to be considered a viable candidate for the permanent role, better than all the new candidates who were considered. I’ve seen working relationships change and deteriorate as formal positions change so that is a possibility I guess, but at least from last season it was working well enough to consider him worth promoting into doing this as a full time role.
The interesting wrinkle is we announced the appointment of Lubel before we announced Briggs’ new role. I wonder if the set piece gig was less a case of promoting him and then finding a replacement for his old role, and more one of hiring the person we really wanted as the development coach and then looking for opportunities to reassign someone who was rated but hadnt yet found their niche, and he just landed in a role that didnt work out.