To be fair, they appointed a specialist set piece coach. I’m not sure what else they could do?
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When Paul Ince was managing Blackburn, I remember his ‘tactical instructions’ were leaked - it was a scruffy drawing of a pitch with arrows going down the wings, and things like ‘CROSS!’ and ‘SHOOT!’ scrawled across it.
Guess he could be our set-piece specialist. I don’t know what he’s up to these days.
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I think we under estimate how hard it is to follow a generational coach. Slot is not bad but the bar is set high. Most people would not have done as well as him.
Finding the next big thing is the challenge.
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I don’t think we could see any dramatic improvement. We’re more or less in the same situation as City last season. Pep spent £200m in the winter transfer just to make them finish in the top 4 with sh*t gameplay till the end. I’ve already given up on this season and put all my hope into some fairy tales in the Champions League. Top 4 with improvements in setup is all I hope for now.
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I would have a lot more sympathy with that argument if these struggles were happening last season, but he dealt with those pressure fine when they were biggest. He is now firmly in the position of this being his team and we ran into a historically bad run of form that has been sandwiched between two period of picking up results while looking incredibly unconvincing. We’re nearly 5 months into the season and we’ve got about 3 games we can point to that were satisfactory. I dont think dissatisfaction with that and doubt over his ability to get us out of it is a case of unfair expectations
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That’s all it takes.
Scruffy piece of paper, 2 sets of goalposts, ‘HEAD BALL TOWARDS GOAL’ scrawled on the goal we’re attacking and ‘HEAD BALL AWAY FROM GOAL’ scrawled on the goal we’re defending.
Sorted.
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Slot: We never get a penalty
Liverpool boss Arne Slot speaking to Sky Sports:
"There was an obvious moment in the first half where we didn’t go to the floor, which I understand because every time we go to the floor we never get a penalty.
He is starting to resemble the Arteta of previous years, when it was always the referee’s fault, the injuries, the uncooperative opponent, the players who didn’t perform well, the ball, the pitch, but never, ever his own fault.
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I always liked Billy Connolly’s quotes about Scottish football. He said that Ally MacLeod thought that tactics were a new kind of mint.
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Next the grass will be the wrong colour.
Good job most EPL pitches have grass these days or I’m sure he’d already have started. 
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I remember Anfield in the 1970s. It usually was at this time of year.
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He isn’t wrong on this to be fair
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Fucking hell any other manager at any other point and you’d be agreeing with him.
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Slot is right, and he is sticking up for the club in saying it.
But because the mind is already made up, at least for some, then it is taken as evidence that he is complaining, and overlooking his own shortcomings.
That’s the problem. When the mind is made up, there’s nothing Slot can do that will suffice.
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He was saying the same ting about Ryan’s suspension for the first game of the season and I recall that not sitting well with a lot of people and this was long before the knives had started coming out for him.
I think it’s one thing to point out mischievous things players at other clubs do, with an insinuation that we dont do the same thing. It’s another to just come out and say we’re more honest than everyone else and rhetorically put your side on a pedestal like this, which is something that surely invites a negative reaction.
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Obviously I have no idea if this is true, but, if it is it’s very damning of Hughes et al. that they have massively misunderstood how important set pieces have become. I have some sympathy (we were fucking league champions) but also it was clear last season that LegoMan was using them successfully and it was always plausible (and likely there were noises heard by those very connected in the game) that other clubs would follow suit.
With the incomplete information we have its reasonable we’ll land on different preferred ideas for what most likely happened, but I dont see anything at all in the situation that suggests we under appreciated the importance of a set piece guy. If anything the story shows the opposite - we had a guy who was filling two roles and we hired someone to take some of his responsibilities from him so he could focus full time on the set pieces. Obviously its gone poorly, but that doesn’t always mean the process was bad, and there are plenty of ways you can land at deciding your best option is an internal candidate and back fill their original role
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But we weren’t strong at set pieces last season either. The idea we’d double down on our ‘set pieces coach’ has obviously been horrendous but in retrospect looks like a miscalculation on how important these were becoming. I hope, when it comes to player recruitment, we are not also making similar mistakes and under valuing aerial prowess - at present we are incredibly reliant on Virg.
What has this style of football won last season, it will likely win the league this season but it’s not being replicated elsewhere and it will probably fall short in the CL.
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What I didn’t understand about Slot’s post game interview was when he said he didn’t think the Ekitike judo incident was a penalty because he didn’t go down. That’s an incorrect reading of the rules. You don’t need to hit the deck for a foul to be awarded. How many times have you seen a player get grabbed from behind by a desperate opponent and pull up with just a frustrated look to the ref who immediately gives the foul? What’s so different about it being in the penalty area? A foul is a foul and that makes it a penalty. The fault here was with that bottler Kavanagh and the useless lino who both watched the entire thing up close and just ignored it because they expect the player to go down.
Just because Hugo didn’t go down doesn’t mean he wasn’t prevented from going on the score. Slot says we are an honest team and he wonlt ask players to dive but I think Hugo will have a very different attitude next time.
That was Slot’s point. He didnt say he didnt think it was a penalty. He pointed out that if refs dont give pens in that sort of situation players will be forced to throw themselves on the floor in search of one.
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