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I thought he just blamed his best man from his marriage and then sacked him.
I assume Hughes is making these decisions mind, let’s be frankly honest though whatever this lad has been doing with set pieces it’s not working.
However I knew someone would mention it as people love the Rodgers comparison.
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I see it as something quite straightforward tbh. Like in many businesses, there’s structure/hierarchy - a main manager who has a team who work under them running the different departments. On this occssion one department is failing so that person should be rightly held accountable.
Yes Slot is the manager and ultimately accountable, so the question now is do things improve or get worse. That’s when we can make more of a judgement call on the managers ability.
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I’m wondering how long that takes. A month? 2 months, maybe?
Well if it changes overnight then Briggs really was the bad egg. Fingers crossed 
No offense to him like but I like easy wins!
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If it changes that fast I’ll assume he was a saboteur.
First time I heard that… but I disagree that it “drove our summer business” because that would entail adding quality depth in numbers and we did quite the opposite.
We went from Diaz, Nunez, Jota, Elliot to Ekitike, Isak and Wirtz. We reduced our squad options both in numbers and variability.
Morton (an usused depth option) to no one - again we did not replace him with a quality option Slot would use.
TAA to Frimpong. No change here.
Quansah and Phillips (though he wasn’t used) to Leoni.
Tsimikas to Kerkez. Only here an argument could be made.
And if the push was to impeove the squad beyond 14 to 15 quality options Slot would use, why did we keep Chiesa and Endo?
With an an aging Mo and VVD, it seems like we did more to limit Slot’s options for rotation rather than improve them.
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But the fact that they continued looking for a set piece coach and only “officially” gave him the role at the end of the summer after failing to find someone suggest misgivings from the start?
Why I might ask? This sounds like a basic hiring mistake by Hughes. Also, as Liverpool FC… how could you fail to be an attractiveness enough option for candidates?
I’m thinking in regards to coaching staff, the loss of Heitinga (who would have known a lot about set pieces as a CB) was probably hugely impactful.
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Yup the roaming thing was good but maybe Slot doesn;t like him because he goes rogue? I do though because Wolves couldn’t keep track of Fede
We need those sniping kind of runs when we are against a packed defence
You can criticise Hughes for it I do agree. But we don’t really know the ins and outs.
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He spoke several times towards the end of the season of how we likely paid a price in the spring for him having used too small a core of players and that to avoid the same thing happening this year he would need to make more use of his squad. Yet Harvey and Quansah to name the two most relevant were still told they needed to leave if they wanted to play. So you may not have heard him give that exact quote, but the message was very clear - we had too few players he felt comfortable using and we needed to address that if we wanted to avoid another spring crash out.
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Agree.
Slot doesnt need to come out directly and say he doesnt like ‘x’ player…he just doesnt play them…the rest can be concluded easily.
Thanks for clarifying. Yeah, I can see that.
Don’t think our summer addressed that though.
If that were the strategy it was executed very poorly. Think we focussed on quality players at the expense of any sort of depth. Still 14 or 15 players or less who can be relied on.
We might not know the ins and outs but ultimately we were looking for a set-piece coach… a position that was becoming increasingly important and we failed to attract a dedicated candidate for the position and ultimately decided on someone who comes from an analysis background. That was perhaps a risk worth taking after considering all options but I don’t believe this was a Slot decision. Afterall, this and many other coaching appointments had no previous connection to Slot and ultimately the job responsibility is Hughes.
But it begs the questions:
- how did we fail to recruit a dedicated, specialist set-piece coach?
- how was the decision made to appoint a non-specialist and is there something wrong with the recruitment process that now needs a tweak? Not concerned about the mistake (everyone can make them) but the response which brings us to…
- why is there still not a dedicated, specialist set-piece coach lined up to replace Briggs? VVD and Slot have pretty much gone public about the urgent need to improve this aspect… does Hughes see the urgency?
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Good post.
We can only attempt to fill in the gaps with what we think we know - all of which has been discussed above, but think useful to put here (based on my reading of things)
- We tried and the right candidate was not forthcoming - we saw the LinkedIn adds
- Likely it was poor from a recruitment strategy perspective in the sense they seemingly struggled to attract the right candidate for the job - that falls with the clubs recruitment strategy - which is probably geared up towards bringing in operational staff more so than football people. Did they leave it too late to decide they needed a specialist, did a deal fall through late and ruin the plans…who knows.
- Depends on how snap the decision to let Briggs go has been. Maybe they have a deal in place for next summer and intended to get by with Briggs, and now decided they can’t. Maybe it’s all sixes and sevens. Probably something in the middle. I’d not imagine we get anyone in in terms of coaches before the end of the season.
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We only know what the club tells the journalists and we don’t know if that is 100% accurate.
Suppose as a fan I’m more interested on what’s on the pitch not what Hughes is up to.
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That’s poor if true. We’d have to conclude that there are people at the upper echelons of the club who don’t know what they are doing.
I honestly have to question how this goes onto Hughes. When Buvac left, there was no gnashing of the teeth at Edwards, for example. Seems to be a recent fad that came about with a few comments about the summers recruitment. Slot didn’t get his players without an inkling then and neither did this Briggs chap get moved around and ultimately the chop without his input either.
We dont have any details of the hiring process at all and it’s jumping to massive conclusions to conclude something went wrong. A post framing it in such negative language as that is certainly not based on credible reporting.
No one goes to school to be a set piece specialist. Briggs was as much as a specialist at this shit as anyone else having already been responsible for it last year. The fact his previous roles were in analysis is irrelevant. That is also what Reijnen’s primary role was and wasnt even what Briggs was hired to do in the first place. That’s just football coaching - a bunch of made up roles filled by football people who put their hand up to take responsibility for something when the need arises
What we know is we felt were a person short in the coaching set up and started a formal search for a full time set piece coach. What we ended up doing was filling that role internally with the guy who was already doing those responsibilities, and pivoting our hiring to the role he would be vacating to take this new role. This is a completely normal set of events when hiring, especially when people are doing largely made up roles with artificial boundaries on their responsibilities like exists for football coaches.
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